At Western Governors University, we are scaling our engineering organization by investing deeply in internal platforms, developer tooling, and software delivery systems that accelerate how teams build, test, and deploy software. We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of these systems and help define the future of developer experience across the organization.
This is a senior technical leadership role focused on backend systems and internal platforms. You will architect and drive the development of core developer infrastructure—including CI/CD systems, internal APIs, service frameworks, automation tooling, and developer-facing platforms that improve productivity and reliability at scale.
You will operate across teams and domains, influencing architecture, engineering standards, and platform strategy while remaining hands-on in designing and building critical systems.
- Lead the architecture and development of internal developer platforms, tooling, and backend services
- Define technical strategy for developer experience (DevEx), including CI/CD, build systems, and deployment automation
- Design and implement scalable backend services and APIs using Java and Python
- Establish engineering standards and patterns for internal tooling, service development, and platform integrations
- Partner with DevOps and platform teams to evolve infrastructure automation and cloud-native delivery systems
- Drive improvements in observability, monitoring, logging, and system diagnostics across engineering platforms
- Build and enhance self-service tooling for service provisioning, environments, and deployments
- Collaborate with engineering leadership to identify systemic bottlenecks in software delivery and resolve them through platform solutions
- Lead cross-team initiatives that improve engineering velocity, reliability, and operational efficiency
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, providing architectural guidance and technical leadership
- Influence long-term platform roadmap and contribute to organizational engineering strategy
- Participate in design reviews, technical governance, and large-scale system planning
- Deep expertise in backend development with Java and/or Python
- Proven experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, or large-scale infrastructure systems
- Strong background in distributed systems, microservices, and API design
- Experience designing and scaling CI/CD systems and software delivery pipelines
- Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments
- Experience building and operating high-reliability backend services
- Familiarity with frontend integration using Angular and TypeScript for internal tools
- Strong systems thinking and ability to operate across multiple technical domains
- Proven ability to influence without authority across engineering organizations
- Excellent communication skills and technical leadership capabilities
- Experience in Staff or Principal-level roles in platform engineering or DevEx organizations
- Experience building developer portals, internal PaaS systems, or self-service infrastructure
- Strong experience with event-driven architectures and message queues
- Experience with API gateways, GraphQL, or service mesh technologies
- Deep knowledge of observability platforms and SRE practices
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar)
- Experience improving large-scale monorepos or multi-team engineering environments
- Background in release engineering or build system optimization
- Passion for improving developer productivity at organizational scale
- Engineering teams across the organization ship faster with reduced friction
- CI/CD and release systems are reliable, scalable, and largely self-service
- Developer experience improvements measurably increase engineering productivity
- Internal platforms reduce operational burden and eliminate repetitive engineering work
- Observability and system insight are standardized across services
- Strong alignment between platform engineering and product engineering teams
- Architectural consistency and engineering standards improve across the organization
- Staff engineer leadership raises the technical bar across multiple teams
- Opportunity to define and scale internal developer platforms at enterprise level
- High-impact role shaping how hundreds of engineers build and ship software
- Modern cloud-native architecture with strong investment in platform engineering
- Collaborative, engineering-led culture with autonomy and technical ownership
- Significant influence over technical direction and engineering strategy
- Mission-driven organization expanding access to education through technology