Principal Software Engineer

Enterprise Technical Vision: Define and champion the long-term technical strategy for UKG's engineering platform, with a particular focus on AI/ML integration, cloud-native architecture, and developer productivity at scale. Industry-Level Thought Leadership: Represent UKG in the broader engineering community through publications, conference talks, open-source contributions, and industry standards participation. Elevate UKG's technical brand externally. Cross-Organizational Architecture: Lead architectural decisions and standards that span multiple engineering domains, products, and value streams. Ensure coherence, scalability, and security of UKG's overall technical ecosystem. AI Strategy & Governance: Own the enterprise-wide AI/ML technical strategy: define how AI capabilities are adopted, evaluated, and governed across the engineering organization. Make high-stakes architectural decisions with incomplete information at industry-defining scale. Executive Partnership: Partner with CTO, VPs of Engineering, and Product leadership to translate business goals into technical strategy. Influence resource allocation, technology investments, and build/buy/partner decisions for AI capabilities. Innovation: Identify transformative technology opportunities — especially in AI/GenAI — that can create step-change competitive advantage for UKG products. Prototype, validate, and advocate for bold technical bets. Mentorship & Talent Development: Elevate the entire engineering organization through mentoring P4/P5 engineers, establishing architectural principles, and creating a culture of technical excellence and responsible AI development. Standards & Governance: Define and enforce engineering-wide standards for code quality, AI evaluation, security, compliance, and developer experience. Govern responsible AI practices at the organization level, including safety, bias, and regulatory compliance. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work with legal, security, product, data science, and operations teams to ensure engineering decisions account for regulatory, ethical, and operational requirements at global scale. Bachelor's/Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent industry experience. 12+ years of software development experience, including significant time in senior technical leadership and architecture roles. Deep, broad expertise in software architecture across distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, SaaS multi-tenancy, and large-scale data systems. Proven track record of defining and executing multi-year technical strategies at the organization or industry level. Recognized internal and external expert with a portfolio of architectural decisions, publications, or contributions that have materially shaped technical direction. Visionary technical leadership in the application of AI/ML to core engineering and product challenges; recognized internally and externally for defining novel approaches to AI integration, evaluation, and governance. Enterprise-scale AI strategy ownership: setting direction for how AI capabilities are adopted, governed, and measured across the engineering organization; influencing executive decision-making on AI investments and risk management. Deep, broad expertise spanning AI architectural patterns, responsible AI, regulatory landscape, and emerging capabilities; ability to make high-stakes technical decisions with incomplete information at industry-defining scale. Excellent leadership, executive communication, and executive presence; demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders. PhD in Computer Science, ML, or a related field. External recognition: published research, notable open-source contributions, patents, or keynote presentations at major technical conferences. Deep experience with LLM fine-tuning, multi-agent systems, AI safety, and AI evaluation at scale. Experience defining regulatory compliance strategies for AI systems (GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act). Experience with domain-specific AI applications in HCM, workforce management, or related enterprise SaaS domains. Demonstrated ability to develop and retain top engineering talent at P4/P5 levels.