Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect

Why UKG:

At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform. Helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That's what we do.

We never stop learning. We never stop challenging the norm. We push for better, and we celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you'll get flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters-and so do you.

UKG builds award-winning HR and workforce management software used worldwide. Ready is a $500M line of business serving ~55,000 SMB customers today and is expected to grow to ~$1.2B in revenue within four years. This growth trajectory makes Ready a strategic product family for UKG - and it creates a unique, high-impact place for an architectural leader to shape scale, M&A integration, and the AI/ML-enabled product roadmap.

About the role:

We are hiring a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead UKG Ready SMB - Architecture & Design, with a heavy emphasis on integrating AI responsibly at product scale and driving M&A technical outcomes. This is a strategic, hands-on individual contributor role: you will define the architecture for Ready's SMB product family, ensure the product can scale to the organization's growth targets, lead technical due diligence and integration for acquisitions, and drive cross-functional alignment on AI/ML adoption and platform readiness. While AI/LLM capabilities will be a major component of the roadmap, the role focuses on architecture, operationalization, governance, and product integration rather than primarily building in-house model training frameworks.

What you'll own:

Architecture & scaling for high growth: Define, communicate and own the Ready SMB architecture to support 55K+ customers today and a product footprint that must scale to the company's $1.2B revenue target - including tenancy models, service boundaries, performance/cost tradeoffs, extensibility and safe upgrade paths.

Architectural Governance: Develop and maintain architectural standards and governance frameworks tailored to HCM requirements, including compliance, data privacy, and security.

AI integration & operationalization: Design production-grade patterns for embedding generative AI and ML features into Ready: model serving patterns, inference topology (edge vs. centralized), latency / throughput SLAs, MLOps pipelines, evaluation & rollout strategies, and monitoring/rollback controls.

M&A technical leadership: Lead technical diligence for acquisitions affecting Ready: evaluate architecture fit, identify integration risks (data, security, compliance), design migration/integration plans, and lead or advise post-close execution to minimize customer and delivery risk.

Cross-functional product enablement: Translate product and customer needs (sales/professional services/CS constraints) into architecture decisions that enable configurability, localization, performance tiers, and integrations with customer systems.

Platform & operational standards: Set platform standards for cloud, CI/CD, container orchestration (Kubernetes), observability, capacity planning and SRE practices that deliver predictable ops at scale and control operating cost as the product grows.

Responsible AI & governance: Establish guardrails for data privacy, model governance, explainability, bias mitigation and auditability appropriate to Ready's customer base and regulatory footprint.

Hands-on technical leadership: Own high-risk or high-impact technical work (POCs, performance optimizations, complex integrations), mentor architects and senior engineers, and lead architecture reviews and decision records.

Documentation & repeatability: Produce high-fidelity architecture artifacts: decision records, integration playbooks, runbooks, API and data contracts, and M&A intake/checklists.

Customer Success: Be extremely customer-oriented, have empathy for the users and have accountability & ownership of the Ready solution.

Communication: Leading upstream and downstream influence and communication as well as advising teams on executive leadership.

Key deliverables / success signals:

• A published Ready SMB architecture roadmap and architecture decision records adopted by product and engineering teams.
• Production-ready AI integration patterns and MLOps requirements implemented by Ready product teams.
• Repeatable, low-risk M&A intake, diligence and integration playbooks that shorten integration time and lower technical risk.
• Demonstrable improvements in time-to-market for cross-team integrations, operational reliability and cost-efficiency as Ready scales to its revenue target.
• Clear evidence of sustained cross-functional alignment (Product, SRE, Security, Sales, Professional Services, and Customer Success).
• Clear ability to mentor to the engineers in the organization. Success and growth of the team being the key metric.

Why this role matters

Ready's growth from a $500M business to a $1.2B business within four years transforms the engineering challenges: scale, cost control, product configurability, integrations and M&A velocity become direct drivers of commercial success. This role sits at the intersection of architecture, AI strategy, and M&A - giving you a rare opportunity to directly shape how Ready scales reliably and responsibly while unlocking new AI-driven product capabilities for tens of thousands of SMB customers.

Minimum required qualifications:

• Seasoned architectural leader: ~12+ years engineering experience, with substantial time leading architecture for large SaaS products and proven individual technical leadership at scale (or equivalent).
• SaaS & multi-tenant expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating multi-tenant, API-first SaaS systems supporting large numbers of customers and multiple operational tiers.
• AI in production: Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML (including LLM/generative features) into production products - defining serving topologies, MLOps, monitoring and governance.
• M&A technical experience: Direct involvement in technical due diligence and post-close technical integration for acquisitions, including data migration, security and compliance assessments.
• Cloud & platform expertise: Deep knowledge of public cloud architectures (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration, API design, eventing/streaming and data platform patterns (ETL/ELT, feature stores, data contracts).
• Operational rigor & security: Strong background in SRE practices, observability (metrics/logs/traces), capacity planning and secure architecture for customer data.
• Communicator & influencer: Proven ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders; exceptional documentation and architecture decision skills.
• Education/credentials: Advanced degree (MS/PhD) preferred but not required if experience demonstrates equivalent technical stature.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior Senior Principal Engineer/Architect experience (or equivalent senior technical role).
• Track record of public speaking, patents, or publications in scalable systems or AI in production.
• Experience with cost-efficient inference strategies, responsible AI tooling (bias testing, explainability), and model lifecycle management.
• Experience with SMB/mid-market customer operations and the commercial constraints that shape product design.
• Experience in regulated industries or privacy-sensitive product engineering.

Working style & expectations

• A strategic, hands-on IC: you will both set direction and deliver/ship technically complex, risky work.
• Expect heavy cross-functional collaboration: Product, Data Science, Security, SRE, Professional Services and Sales will be regular partners.
• Significant time will be spent on executive-level planning, high-stakes M&A technical reviews, and technical onboarding of acquired assets.
• Expected to be a strong mentor for P5/P6's within the organization.
• Be highly accountable for how the software runs in Production and takes ownership of ensuring customer success.

Company Overview:

UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work. With the world''s largest collection of workforce insights, and people-first AI, our ability to reveal unseen ways to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent, is unmatched. It''s this expertise that equips our customers with the intelligence to solve any challenge in any industry - because great organizations know their workforce is their competitive edge. Learn more at ukg.com.

Equal Opportunity Employer

UKG is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories.

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Disability Accommodation in the Application and Interview Process

For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email UKGCareers@ukg.com.

The pay range for this position is $207,400 to $298,100. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG's benefits and rewards at https://www.ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits