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.

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 andmaintainarchitectural 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