Full Job Description
Role Overview
As a Lead Software Development Engineer at UKG, you will provide technical leadership in the design, development, and deployment of our next-generation, highly scalable, AI-native enterprise platforms. This pivotal role sits at the intersection of core cloud-native backend systems, advanced customer experience (CX) platforms, and Salesforce ecosystem integrations. You will play a defining role in designing systems that blend traditional enterprise workflows with Agentic AI, large language models (LLMs), and intelligent orchestration to power platforms at a massive global scale.
This role requires a unique blend of deep, hands-on technical expertise, systems thinking, and strategic influence. You will champion engineering excellence, mentor senior talent, guide critical architectural decisions, and collaborate closely with product, business, and AI/ML teams to translate complex business objectives into resilient, secure, and highly performant platform solutions.
Key Responsibilities
1. Platform Architecture & AI-Native Evolution
Design Scalable Backends: Lead the system design and evolution of highly scalable, secure, and distributed services, and API platforms capable of handling high-volume transaction loads.
AI & Agentic Orchestration: Drive the integration of LLM-based services and autonomous Agentic AI frameworks into the core product architecture, ensuring low latency, high availability, and seamless tool/workflow orchestration.
CRM & Salesforce Integration: Design and optimize enterprise-grade integration patterns between UKG platforms and Salesforce, ensuring highly secure, real-time data flows and robust linkages.
2. Engineering Excellence & Operational Stability
High-Volume Data & Migration: Build and optimize complex data integration layers, and resilient data migration pipelines that support business domains.
Observability & Resilience: Establish rigorous standards for system observability, monitoring, alerting, proactive rate-limiting, and resource management to prevent production bottlenecks and ensure high-availability SLAs.
Security & Governance: Drive rigorous standards for data privacy, compliance, and secure API structures across all distributed systems.
3. Collaboration & Strategy
Cross-Functional Influence: Conduct technical reviews, facilitate collaborative design sessions across backend and AI/ML teams, and influence technical direction across large, multi-disciplinary organizations.
About You
Basic Qualifications
Years of Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of design ownership over complex, distributed, and highly available enterprise systems.
Systems Architecture: Deep expertise in backend system design, RESTful/gRPC APIs, event-driven architectures and enterprise system design patterns.
AI Integration: Hands-on experience integrating, scaling, and productionizing AI/ML applications, LLM APIs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, or agentic frameworks into existing software ecosystems.
Salesforce & Enterprise Ecosystems: Proven experience designing systems that interface deeply with major CRM platforms- Salesforce and orchestrating complex integrations.
Leadership & Soft Skills
Problem Solving: Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with a demonstrated ability to bring structure to highly ambiguous business requirements.
Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to distill complex architectural decisions for executive, business, and non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred Qualifications
Domain Expertise: Experience building large-scale platforms within Payment Services, Workforce Management, or enterprise SaaS domains.
Data Migration Experience: Prior experience designing large-scale system migrations and system-wide application refactoring initiatives.
Community Engagement: Active contributor to open-source software, publisher of technical blogs, or speaker at industry engineering conferences.
The pay range for this position is $133,900 to $190,750. 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
