About the Team:

UKG is seeking a highly skilled and influential Lead 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 platforms that enable product teams to deliver high-quality software at speed.

About the Role:

As a technical lead, you will design and implement modern automation solutions, establish 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 play a key role in driving quality transformation through reusable automation frameworks, continuous testing, observability, AI-assisted development, and agentic approaches to software validation.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with a passion for mentoring others, improving engineering processes, and building reusable solutions that benefit multiple teams across UKG. They will bring the mindset of a software engineer and platform builder, with practical experience applying modern development tools, Claude Code, Model Context Protocol, and AI agents to improve engineering productivity and quality outcomes.

Responsibilities:

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

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, quality engineering, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, test architecture, or a related discipline, including strong technical leadership, communication, and mentoring skills.
• Strong programming proficiency in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, or a comparable language, with experience designing maintainable automation frameworks or internal engineering platforms.
• Hands-on experience with Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, or similar browser automation technologies, along with API, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins, and practical knowledge of Git, pull requests, code reviews, build systems, and deployment workflows.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud services, modern application architectures, and observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and failure diagnostics.
• Hands-on experience using Claude Code, Codex, or comparable AI coding assistants for substantive engineering work, with practical knowledge of MCP, tool calling, and agentic application development.
• Ability to evaluate, govern, and safely manage AI-generated code and autonomous workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building shared engineering platforms, developer-productivity tools, or reusable automation solutions.
• Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, or Splunk.
• Knowledge of performance, security, accessibility, resiliency, and production-validation practices.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, AI evaluation, or multi-agent systems.
• Experience modernizing manual testing processes and replacing tool-specific automation with scalable, reusable engineering solutions.

What Success Looks Like
• Product teams adopt common engineering capabilities instead of creating separate automation frameworks.
• CI/CD feedback becomes faster, more reliable, and more actionable.
• Test flakiness, duplicated effort, and automation maintenance costs are reduced.
• AI-assisted development produces measurable improvements in engineering productivity and defect detection.
• Agentic solutions operate with appropriate security, evaluation, governance, and human oversight.
• Manual testers develop stronger programming, automation, DevOps, and AI-engineering skills.

The strongest candidate will think like a software engineer and platform builder who specializes in quality. They should be able to demonstrate systems they have designed and built-not only tools they have used.

The pay range for this position is $129,500 to $186,100. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG's benefits and rewards at https://www.ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits