Lead Software Development Engineer
About The Position
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. 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.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice To Haves
- 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.
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.
Benefits
- flexibility that’s real
- benefits you can count on
- performance-based bonus plan
- restricted stock unit awards
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
