Principal Software 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.
Role Overview
We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Software Engineer to join the engineering team for the Ready product. This role is focused on leading the technical direction, architecture, and engineering strategy for a modern, scalable, resilient, and intelligent enterprise SaaS product.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will play a key role in defining the technology stack, shaping the technical roadmap, driving architectural decisions, and leading complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams. You will be expected to bring deep technical expertise, enterprise-scale thinking, and a strong understanding of performance, reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
This role requires a hands-on technical leader who can guide engineering teams through complex design decisions, lead technical discussions, troubleshoot critical technical issues, and influence the long-term evolution of the Ready product. The ideal candidate will have strong proficiency in Java, database technologies, cloud-native engineering, distributed systems, and modern AI-assisted software engineering practices.
We are looking for an engineer who combines strategic technical vision with practical execution, mentors senior engineers, raises engineering standards, and helps build a product platform that is scalable, secure, observable, performant, and ready for the future.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
Define and drive the architectural vision for the Ready product, ensuring scalability, resiliency, performance, maintainability, and long-term extensibility.
Lead the evaluation, selection, and evolution of the core technology stack, including application frameworks, cloud-native services, database technologies, observability tools, messaging systems, and AI-enabled engineering capabilities.
Define and influence the technical roadmap in partnership with engineering leadership, product management, architecture, and cross-functional stakeholders.
Lead architecture reviews, design discussions, and technical decision-making for complex product and platform initiatives.
Provide technical direction across multiple teams and ensure alignment with enterprise engineering standards, security expectations, and operational goals.
Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and engineering practices to continuously improve product capabilities, developer productivity, and system reliability.
Software Engineering & Platform Development
Design and build highly scalable, secure, and reliable cloud-native services using Java and related enterprise technologies.
Lead the development of distributed systems, APIs, backend services, event-driven workflows, and data-intensive applications.
Drive modernization initiatives that improve system performance, scalability, maintainability, and engineering velocity.
Establish and promote engineering best practices around code quality, testing, automation, design patterns, performance optimization, and maintainable architecture.
Lead complex cross-functional engineering initiatives that require coordination across multiple teams, systems, and stakeholders.
Ensure the Ready product is built with an enterprise-level mindset, including strong consideration for scalability, compliance, security, availability, customer experience, and operational readiness.
Observability, Reliability & Operational Excellence
Drive platform-wide improvements in observability, monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and service health management.
Define and implement observability standards using platforms and tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, or similar technologies.
Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex production issues, performance bottlenecks, system failures, and reliability concerns.
Partner with engineering, operations, and SRE teams to define service-level objectives, operational metrics, error budgets, incident response practices, and reliability improvement plans.
Lead post-incident reviews and ensure corrective actions result in long-term improvements to architecture, automation, resiliency, and monitoring.
Champion proactive engineering practices that improve product stability, reduce operational risk, and enhance customer trust.
Performance Engineering & Scalability
Drive performance tuning across application services, database layers, APIs, integration points, and distributed system components.
Identify and resolve scalability challenges in high-volume, enterprise-grade SaaS environments.
Lead capacity planning, load testing, profiling, query optimization, caching strategies, and performance benchmarking efforts.
Ensure that technical designs account for throughput, latency, concurrency, data growth, resiliency, and cost efficiency.
Partner with teams to establish measurable performance goals and continuously improve system responsiveness and efficiency.
AI-First Engineering & Agents
Bring strong insight into AI trends, AI-assisted engineering, intelligent automation, and agent-based capabilities.
Drive adoption of AI tools and practices to improve software design, development, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and operational workflows.
Identify opportunities to leverage AI and agents within the engineering lifecycle and product ecosystem to improve productivity, quality, and customer value.
Guide teams on responsible AI usage, including security, privacy, governance, explainability, and reliability considerations.
Evaluate AI-enabled platforms, developer tools, observability assistants, coding agents, and automation frameworks that can improve engineering outcomes at scale.
Database & Data Architecture
Provide technical leadership in database design, data modeling, query optimization, transaction management, and scalable data access patterns.
Work with relational and non-relational database technologies to support enterprise-grade application requirements.
Guide teams in designing reliable, performant, and maintainable database solutions that support high-volume data processing and business-critical workflows.
Lead troubleshooting of complex database performance issues, including indexing, locking, query plans, connection management, data partitioning, and schema evolution.
Ensure data architecture decisions align with security, compliance, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability goals.
Security, Compliance & Enterprise Readiness
Champion secure software design and development practices across the Ready product.
Ensure systems are designed with strong consideration for authentication, authorization, data protection, encryption, auditability, and secure integration patterns.
Promote enterprise readiness through resilient architecture, operational maturity, compliance awareness, and high-quality engineering standards.
Partner with security, architecture, and platform teams to ensure technical solutions align with organizational governance and risk management expectations.
Technical Mentorship & Influence
Mentor senior engineers, technical leads, and development teams on architecture, design, engineering practices, troubleshooting, and technical decision-making.
Lead technical discussions with clarity, influence, and strong engineering judgment.
Build consensus across teams on complex architecture and design decisions.
Raise engineering standards through design reviews, technical coaching, documentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
Minimum Qualifications
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
16+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building enterprise-scale software products.
Strong proficiency in Java, including modern Java frameworks, backend service development, concurrency, performance tuning, and scalable application design.
Deep experience with database technologies, including relational databases, SQL optimization, schema design, transaction management, indexing strategies, and performance troubleshooting.
Proven experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and cloud-native enterprise applications.
Strong understanding of observability platforms, monitoring, logging, tracing,

Work arrangement
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