Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect

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.

 

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.

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.