Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Team

UKG's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice is a small, elite team that embeds directly with our most strategic customers to solve high-value problems that sit just beyond the current product boundary. We deploy in small pods, move fast, learn the customer's world, and build things that work in production.

The strongest FDEs combine technical depth with curiosity, creativity, perseverance, and customer empathy. They are comfortable with ambiguity because they are motivated by discovery: learning unfamiliar domains, finding the real problem, building the first working version, and turning what works into reusable capabilities for the broader platform.

We are inspired by the best forward-deployed and outcome-delivery organizations in enterprise technology. Our operating model is simple: get close to the customer, define the outcome precisely, build something real, and use what we learn in the field to shape the future of the product.

The Role

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you will lead technical discovery, solution design, and hands-on engineering for strategic customer engagements. You will sit at the intersection of customer needs, product possibility, and production software: turning ambiguous business problems into prototypes, architectures, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows that create measurable customer impact.

At this level, you will typically own the technical direction for an engagement or major solution area, guide other FDEs, and shape reusable patterns for the broader practice. You are close to the customer and close to the code. You are expected to build, communicate, unblock, and raise the quality of the solution around you.

Enterprise HCM, Payroll, or Workforce Management experience is helpful, but it is not the gatekeeper. We are looking for strong engineers who love learning unfamiliar domains, designing novel solutions, and pushing through ambiguity until something works in the real world.

What You Will Do

Own Technical Discovery and Invention

• Partner directly with customer stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, data, systems, constraints, and opportunities for innovation.
• Ask sharp questions that reveal the real problem, not just the requested feature or implementation path.
• Translate ambiguous customer needs into hypotheses, prototypes, technical designs, implementation plans, and operational runbooks.
• Explore unfamiliar technologies, customer domains, and AI capabilities with curiosity, speed, and sound engineering judgment.
• Identify when a field-built solution should become a reusable platform capability or reference pattern.

Build and Ship Production Solutions

• Design and build production-grade APIs, integrations, workflow automations, data pipelines, internal tools, and customer-facing technical solutions.
• Rapidly prototype ideas, test assumptions with customers, and mature the best ideas into maintainable production systems.
• Integrate UKG with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, data, and related systems using secure, auditable designs.
• Own technical delivery through discovery, design, build, testing, go-live, and early operational handoff.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across speed, quality, scalability, security, maintainability, and customer impact.

Lead the Engineering Pod

• Set technical direction for an FDE engagement or major solution area and keep engineering work focused on the customer outcome.
• Guide other FDEs through architecture reviews, pairing, code reviews, technical planning, and high-judgment customer moments.
• Collaborate closely with the engagement PM, customer teams, Product, Engineering, Support, and Security to surface risks, dependencies, and decisions early.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Navigate difficult delivery moments with creativity, perseverance, and a bias toward making progress.

Shape Product and Practice

• Contribute reusable components, templates, examples, reference architectures, demos, and implementation notes that accelerate future engagements.
• Provide clear feedback to Product and Engineering on platform gaps, repeatable customer needs, and opportunities to productize field-built solutions.
• Help develop the FDE playbook: better discovery methods, solution patterns, demo assets, tooling, and engineering practices.
• Identify expansion signals and help define the next high-value problems the team should solve for the customer.
• AI-Enabled Workflow Responsibilities
• Identify practical, high-impact uses of AI within existing enterprise workflows.
• Prototype and deploy AI-assisted patterns such as intelligent intake, summarization, recommendations, routing, data extraction, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Design for security, privacy, compliance, explainability, evaluation, monitoring, and operational control from the start.
• Apply sound judgment around model limitations, sensitive data, access controls, failure modes, and responsible use of AI.
• Turn successful AI patterns into reusable implementation guidance for the broader FDE library.

What Makes You Successful

Successful Staff FDEs combine strong engineering judgment with a builder's mindset and deep customer empathy. The following traits matter as much as specific domain experience:

• Curiosity: You genuinely enjoy learning new technologies, customer domains, workflows, and AI capabilities.
• Creativity: You look for novel, elegant ways to solve problems when there is no established playbook.
• Perseverance: You stay resilient through ambiguity, iteration, technical blockers, and changing customer needs.
• Technical judgment: You know when to prototype quickly, when to harden a system, and when to simplify the design.
• Builder's mindset: You prefer making things real - prototypes, code, demos, tools, and production systems.
• Customer empathy: You listen carefully, ask strong questions, and connect technical choices to business outcomes.
• Systems thinking: You understand how people, process, data, and technology interact in real-world environments.
• Leadership: You raise the quality of the team through clarity, mentorship, practical standards, and calm execution.

What You Will Bring

• Typically 7+ years of experience building software, developer platforms, cloud applications, AI-enabled products, technical solutions, or production integrations.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across APIs, cloud services, data flows, testing, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and operational support.
• Experience designing and deploying production systems or customer-facing technical solutions in ambiguous environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction for a workstream, engagement, or complex solution area.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain tradeoffs clearly to technical teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar domains quickly and turning incomplete information into practical technical plans.
• Familiarity with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-enabled tools, LLMs, copilots, workflow automation, or agentic patterns.
• Sound judgment around security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and responsible use of AI.
• Preferred, Not Required
• Enterprise software experience is a differentiator, not a gatekeeper. Exceptional engineers from startup, SaaS, platform, developer tools, AI product, consulting, or modern enterprise software backgrounds are encouraged to apply.
• Experience with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, SSO, or integration-heavy environments.
• Experience with REST APIs, event-driven systems, ETL/ELT, data pipelines, workflow orchestration, or identity integrations.
• Experience with AI agent patterns such as tools, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed, solutions architecture, sales engineering, consulting engineering, or customer-facing product engineering role.
• Experience turning field-built solutions into reusable product, platform, or reference architecture capabilities.

What Success Looks Like

• Customers reach meaningful value faster because you translated ambiguity into working software.
• High-impact prototypes become stable, secure, maintainable production solutions.
• Customer stakeholders and internal teams trust the technical approach and understand key tradeoffs.
• Reusable assets, patterns, and technical lessons are adopted across the FDE practice and broader engineering organization.
• Product and Engineering receive clear, actionable feedback from the field.
• Other FDEs are more effective because of your technical leadership, mentoring, and example.
• Delivered solutions uncover expansion opportunities and shape future UKG platform capabilities.

Who Should Apply

Apply if you want one of the rare engineering roles where you get to learn directly from customers, invent new AI-powered workflows, build production software, and help define a new practice from the ground up. This role is for engineers who love solving hard problems, not just writing code.

The pay range for this position is $129,500 to $214,015. 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