Principal Software Engineer- Eng

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.

Principal Software Engineer-ENG:

This Principal Software Engineer- Eng role serves as a technical authority and architectural leader for UKG’s Pro Foundation team, which owns HCM-level platform capabilities and shared services consumed across HR, Recruiting, Benefits, Pay, and adjacent domain teams.
In this role, you will help define and deliver the foundational services, APIs, frameworks, data access patterns, and engineering standards that enable multiple HCM product teams to build faster, operate more reliably, and reduce duplicated platform work. You will work in an agile environment, partnering closely with engineers, product managers, architects, and leadership across the HCM portfolio to deliver secure, scalable, observable, and AI-ready services. You will be responsible not only for building systems, but for defining how shared platform capabilities should be built, adopted, and operated across domains.
You will champion an AI-first engineering mindset, leveraging modern AI capabilities to accelerate development, enhance platform quality, improve system reliability, and transform how teams build and operate software.

Key Responsibilities:
Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Define and evolve the architecture for HCM foundation services that support HR, Recruiting, Benefits, Pay, and other consuming teams.
- Drive architectural decisions across shared services, APIs, data access patterns, platform libraries, build systems, and integration points.
- Ensure systems are designed for high availability, correctness, scalability, observability, security, auditability, and regulatory compliance.
- Lead architecture and design reviews; set standards for system design, code quality, operational readiness, and cross-team adoption.

Platform & Foundation Services
- Build and evolve reusable platform capabilities, service contracts, and libraries that reduce duplicated work across HCM product teams.
- Design data models, persistence strategies, and service-layer patterns across relational and NoSQL systems where appropriate.
- Create secure, reliable APIs and event-driven patterns that allow domain teams to consume HCM foundation capabilities consistently.
- Support modernization efforts such as service decomposition, .NET Core enablement, build modernization, and migration from legacy platform dependencies.

Mentorship & Cross-Team Influence
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; guide design discussions and complex implementation efforts.
- Influence technical direction across multiple teams and initiatives beyond immediate ownership.
- Partner with product, security, compliance, and domain engineering stakeholders to translate portfolio needs into durable platform solutions.
- Drive long-term technical vision while balancing near-term delivery, adoption, and operational support needs.

Qualifications:
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a senior, staff, or principal level.
• Deep experience designing and building distributed systems using .NET Core and modern backend architectures.
• Experience building and supporting large-scale, business-critical platform services, shared APIs, or foundational systems consumed by multiple product teams.
• Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams or organizations. Demonstrated ability to set architectural standards and drive adoption.
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to break ambiguous problems into clear technical designs.
• Experience applying AI-assisted engineering practices or partnering with AI, ML, or data teams to productionize intelligent capabilities.
• Proven ability to lead highly complex, cross-functional initiatives with significant business impact.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience with HCM, workforce management, payroll, benefits, recruiting, or other highly regulated enterprise systems.
• Familiarity with AI concepts such as anomaly detection, rule augmentation, model inference pipelines, or decision-support systems.
• Experience desi