Software Development Engineer

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.

About the Team:

UKG is seeking a highly skilled Software Development Engineer to join our Shared Services team within Employee Solutions & Experience (ESE). This role is focused on advancing Quality Engineering through scalable test automation, strong software engineering practices, AI-enabled capabilities, and shared solutions that enable product teams to deliver high-quality software at speed.

About the Role: 

As a Software Development Engineer, you will design and implement modern automation solutions, contribute to engineering and DevOps best practices, and partner closely with development teams across ESE to improve quality, test coverage, delivery efficiency, and release confidence. You will contribute to quality transformation through reusable automation frameworks, continuous testing, observability, AI-assisted development, and agentic approaches to software validation.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical expertise with a passion for improving engineering processes, supporting other engineers, and building reusable solutions that benefit multiple teams across UKG. They will bring the mindset of a software engineer, with practical experience applying modern development tools, AI coding assistants, Model Context Protocol, and AI agents to improve engineering productivity and quality outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable test automation frameworks, libraries, shared services, and developer tools. 
• Build reusable capabilities for browser, API, integration, contract, performance, accessibility, and end-to-end testing.
• Establish engineering standards for automation architecture, code quality, testability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Integrate automated quality checks, release validations, and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines while improving execution speed, parallelization, stability, diagnostics, and feedback time.
• Implement automation observability through logging, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts; analyze test, build, deployment, application, and production telemetry to identify quality issues.
• Partner with development, DevOps, SRE, security, architecture, and release teams to improve delivery quality and advance common platforms and reusable engineering patterns.
• Mentor engineers and manual testers in automation, software development, DevOps, and AI-assisted engineering.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, quality engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, test automation, or a related field, with proficiency in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, or a comparable language. 
• Experience designing and maintaining automation frameworks, internal engineering tools, and automated workflows.
• Hands-on experience with Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, or similar browser automation technologies, as well as API, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing.
• Proficiency with Git, pull requests, code reviews, build systems, deployment workflows, and CI/CD platforms such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
• Working knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, cloud services, modern application architectures, and observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and failure diagnostics.
• Hands-on experience with Claude Code, Codex, or comparable AI coding assistants, with a working understanding of MCP, tool calling, and agentic application development.
• Ability to review, validate, and safely apply AI-generated code and automated workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience helping teams transition from manual testing or tool-specific automation to reusable, maintainable engineering solutions. 
• Knowledge of performance, security, accessibility, resiliency, and production validation practices.
• Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, AI evaluation, and multi-agent systems.
• Experience with observability platforms such as OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, Applicatio