Staff Software Developer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Staff Software Developer roles are among the most frequently sponsored positions in the U.S., with employers regularly filing H-1B visa and O-1 visa petitions for senior engineers. Most require a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, and specialty occupation approval rates at this level are high. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsIf you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.
Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.
The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.
At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
Grade: Technical 411
Pay Range: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00
Job Description
WGU’s Student Experience team builds the student portal that working adults use to navigate their education, monitor progress, connect with mentors, and determine what comes next. The team is now developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU’s systems to answer students’ questions about their individual degree journeys.
As a Staff Software Engineer, AI, you will be the technical center of this work. You will design and build the assistant’s production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student’s information. This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software.
You will help simplify WGU’s complex technology landscape from the student’s perspective while contributing to an ambitious effort to apply AI meaningfully within higher education. You will join a culture that encourages engineers to operate as inventors, frame undefined problems, and build solutions beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items.
What You’ll Do
- Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the supporting service layer.
- Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, building authorization-aware retrieval and generation that protect student information and meet FERPA obligations.
- Build guardrails and governance capabilities, including input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
- Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices that measure groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost for nondeterministic AI outputs.
- Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features across services, APIs, data access, and user interfaces within an established Java and Angular environment.
- Integrate the assistant with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services, and participate in production support and service restoration.
- Mentor engineers through technical design, code review, and pairing while documenting decisions and modeling strong AI-assisted development practices.
What You’ll Bring
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
- Demonstrated technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading the design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate work.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience building LLM-backed applications in production, including retrieval-augmented generation, inference integration, and evaluation of output quality.
- Full-stack production experience with a server-side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node, C#, or Go, and a modern front-end framework such as Angular, React, or Vue.
- Experience integrating with databases and with third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
- The ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions effectively to engineering, security, governance, and business partners. Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as one year of experience for one year of education and is at the discretion of the hiring manager.
Bonus Points
- Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
- Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red-teaming, or prompt-injection testing.
- Experience with Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments such as FERPA or HIPAA, established codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
What to Expect
At WGU, our mission drives everything we do, including how we hire. Our interview experience is designed to give qualified candidates the opportunity to show their best work through meaningful conversations and collaboration.
We thoughtfully review every application and invite forward the candidates whose experience and potential best align with the role and our mission.
Work Location
This is a full-time, in-office position requiring five days per week in our Salt Lake City, Utah office, designed to foster the collaboration and connection that fuel our best work.
Travel Requirement
This position requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year). Additional travel may include conferences, visits to company locations, and other business-related events as needed. Additional travel may be assigned as needed to support business requirements.
Position & Application Details
Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
Additional Information
Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.
Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.
Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.
If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.
Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.
The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.
At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
Grade: Technical 411
Pay Range: $161,000.00 - $249,500.00
Job Description
WGU’s Student Experience team builds the student portal that working adults use to navigate their education, monitor progress, connect with mentors, and determine what comes next. The team is now developing an AI assistant integrated into the portal and grounded in WGU’s systems to answer students’ questions about their individual degree journeys.
As a Staff Software Engineer, AI, you will be the technical center of this work. You will design and build the assistant’s production foundation, including retrieval, inference, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and a security model that isolates each student’s information. This is a hands-on product engineering role for someone who wants to set technical direction while continuing to design, code, test, and operate software.
You will help simplify WGU’s complex technology landscape from the student’s perspective while contributing to an ambitious effort to apply AI meaningfully within higher education. You will join a culture that encourages engineers to operate as inventors, frame undefined problems, and build solutions beyond the boundaries of individual backlog items.
What You’ll Do
- Design and build the chat foundation for the student portal assistant, including retrieval over WGU content and data, inference integration, conversation state, and the supporting service layer.
- Own the assistant’s security and privacy model, building authorization-aware retrieval and generation that protect student information and meet FERPA obligations.
- Build guardrails and governance capabilities, including input and output filtering, refusal and escalation paths, prompt-injection resistance, audit logging, and explainability controls.
- Establish evaluation, regression testing, and observability practices that measure groundedness, accuracy, quality, latency, and cost for nondeterministic AI outputs.
- Design, build, test, and operate full-stack portal features across services, APIs, data access, and user interfaces within an established Java and Angular environment.
- Integrate the assistant with systems of record, identity providers, and internal services, and participate in production support and service restoration.
- Mentor engineers through technical design, code review, and pairing while documenting decisions and modeling strong AI-assisted development practices.
What You’ll Bring
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production web applications and web services.
- Demonstrated technical ownership beyond individual feature delivery, including leading the design and build of a significant system or initiative and influencing technical decisions beyond your immediate work.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience building LLM-backed applications in production, including retrieval-augmented generation, inference integration, and evaluation of output quality.
- Full-stack production experience with a server-side language such as Java, Python, TypeScript/Node, C#, or Go, and a modern front-end framework such as Angular, React, or Vue.
- Experience integrating with databases and with third-party or enterprise systems in an existing infrastructure.
- The ability to design for security, privacy, scale, reliability, and cost while communicating technical decisions effectively to engineering, security, governance, and business partners. Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as one year of experience for one year of education and is at the discretion of the hiring manager.
Bonus Points
- Production experience with AWS Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, or comparable managed model platforms, along with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, or cloud-native delivery.
- Experience with authorization-aware retrieval, multi-tenant data isolation, vector databases, hybrid search, LLM evaluation and observability, red-teaming, or prompt-injection testing.
- Experience with Angular, identity and access management, regulated data environments such as FERPA or HIPAA, established codebase modernization, or higher education technology.
What to Expect
At WGU, our mission drives everything we do, including how we hire. Our interview experience is designed to give qualified candidates the opportunity to show their best work through meaningful conversations and collaboration.
We thoughtfully review every application and invite forward the candidates whose experience and potential best align with the role and our mission.
Work Location
This is a full-time, in-office position requiring five days per week in our Salt Lake City, Utah office, designed to foster the collaboration and connection that fuel our best work.
Travel Requirement
This position requires occasional travel of up to 20%, including required attendance at designated company summits (typically one to two per year). Additional travel may include conferences, visits to company locations, and other business-related events as needed. Additional travel may be assigned as needed to support business requirements.
Position & Application Details
Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.
How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.
Additional Information
Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.
Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.
Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.
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Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Staff Software Developer roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Staff Software Developer
Target companies with established H-1B track records
Large tech employers and mid-size product companies sponsor Staff Software Developer roles consistently year after year. A documented history of approvals signals that their legal and HR teams understand the process, reducing your risk of a procedurally weak petition.
Confirm your degree field aligns with the role
USCIS requires a direct relationship between your degree and the specific job duties. A computer science, software engineering, or information systems degree is ideal. Unrelated degrees require stronger documentation and may invite a Request for Evidence from the adjudicator.
Document your seniority clearly in the offer letter
Staff-level roles carry higher complexity and independent judgment expectations than mid-level positions. Your offer letter and support letter should explicitly describe the technical scope, architecture responsibilities, and cross-functional influence the role involves to support the specialty occupation argument.
Ask whether the employer files premium processing
Premium processing delivers a decision within 15 business days instead of several months. Many employers offer it routinely for senior engineering hires. Confirming this upfront helps you plan your start date and avoid extended gaps between offer acceptance and authorization to work.
Understand how cap-exempt employers change your options
Universities, nonprofit research institutions, and qualifying government entities are exempt from the H-1B annual lottery. A Staff Software Developer role at one of these employers can be filed at any time of year, with no random selection determining whether your petition is even considered.
Start conversations early if you're mid-OPT or in a grace period
Immigration timelines move slowly relative to hiring timelines. If your work authorization is expiring, raise it during early interviews so the employer can engage their immigration counsel promptly. Delays in filing can result in gaps in work authorization even after an offer is signed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a Staff Software Developer role qualify as a specialty occupation for H-1B purposes?
Yes, in nearly all cases. USCIS consistently recognizes software development as a specialty occupation because the role requires at minimum a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a directly related field. Staff-level roles, which typically involve system architecture, technical leadership, and complex problem-solving, present an even stronger specialty occupation argument than entry-level positions. Denials at this seniority level are uncommon when the petition is well-documented.
What if my degree is not in computer science, can I still get sponsored?
Possibly, but it requires more documentation. USCIS allows degrees in closely related fields such as mathematics, electrical engineering, or information systems. If your degree is in an unrelated field, your employer's attorney will need to argue equivalency using a combination of education, professional training, and work experience. A credential evaluation from a recognized organization and detailed experience letters from former employers strengthen the case significantly.
How does the H-1B lottery affect my chances as a Staff Software Developer?
The lottery applies to most private-sector employers and selects registrations randomly, regardless of your qualifications or seniority. Approximately 85,000 slots are available annually against several hundred thousand registrations, producing selection rates around 20 to 25 percent in recent years. One practical strategy is to target cap-exempt employers, which bypass the lottery entirely, or to explore the E-3 visa if you hold Australian citizenship. Migrate Mate filters jobs by visa type to help you identify sponsoring employers aligned with your situation.
Can a Staff Software Developer role support an O-1A visa instead of H-1B?
Yes, if you can document extraordinary ability in your field. The O-1A requires evidence across criteria such as high salary relative to peers, judging others' work, original contributions of major significance, or published work. For a Staff Software Developer, this might include patents, open-source projects with substantial adoption, peer review participation, or recognition through awards. The O-1A has no annual cap and no lottery, making it a viable alternative for engineers with a strong professional record.
What should I look for in a sponsoring employer at the Staff level?
Beyond technical fit, look for employers with an in-house immigration team or a retained immigration law firm, a history of H-1B visa filings at senior levels, and a clear process for extending and transferring status. At the Staff level, you may be at a company for several years, so long-term sponsorship stability matters. Migrate Mate surfaces Staff Software Developer roles specifically at employers that sponsor visas, so you can focus your applications where sponsorship is already confirmed.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Staff Software Developer jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.