Principal Software Engineer- Eng

UKG•Sunrise, FL

About The Position

This Principal Software Engineer- Eng role serves as the technical authority and architectural leader for UKG’s payroll processing platforms. You will define and evolve the technical strategy for highly scalable, fault-tolerant payroll processing agents and services that operate on large, complex datasets with strict requirements around accuracy, security, compliance, and performance. As the most senior technical contributor on the team, you will guide architecture across distributed systems built primarily on .NET Core, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Angular, while collaborating closely with product, data, and AI-focused teams. A significant aspect of this role is enabling and integrating AI-driven capabilities—including intelligent automation, anomaly detection, and decision-support systems—into mission-critical payroll workflows. This role does not manage people directly, but it sets technical direction, mentors engineers, and influences engineering standards across teams.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a senior, staff, or principal level.
Deep experience designing and building distributed systems using .NET Core and modern backend architectures.
Strong hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB, including data modeling and performance tuning.
Experience building and supporting large-scale, business-critical processing systems.
Proven ability to lead architecture, influence technical decisions, and mentor engineers.
Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to break ambiguous problems into clear technical designs.
Experience collaborating with AI, ML, or data science teams to productionize analytical or intelligent capabilities.

Nice To Haves

Experience with payroll, HCM, financial, or other highly regulated enterprise systems.
Familiarity with AI concepts such as anomaly detection, rule augmentation, model inference pipelines, or decision-support systems.
Experience designing systems with strict requirements for compliance, auditability, and data privacy.
Front-end experience supporting or integrating with Angular applications.
Background in event-driven, batch, or hybrid processing architectures.
Track record of shaping long-term platform architecture across multiple teams or domains.
Experience modernizing legacy systems or leading large-scale technical transformations.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the architecture for large-scale, distributed payroll processing agents and supporting services.
Drive architectural decisions across backend services, data stores, APIs, and front-end integration points.
Ensure systems are designed for high availability, correctness, scalability, observability, and regulatory compliance.
Lead architecture and design reviews; set standards for system design, code quality, and operational readiness.
Design and optimize high-throughput payroll calculation engines and batch/near-real-time processing pipelines.
Build systems that handle complex payroll rules, country/state variations, and edge cases with deterministic accuracy.
Ensure strong transactional integrity, auditability, and traceability across payroll workflows.
Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues involving data consistency, performance bottlenecks, or distributed processing failures.
Partner with AI, data science, and applied ML teams to integrate AI-driven capabilities into payroll processing flows.
Translate AI and analytical requirements into scalable, production-grade software designs.
Enable intelligent automation, anomaly detection, forecasting, or recommendations without owning model creation.
Design systems that support explainability, monitoring, and safe rollout of AI-assisted features in regulated environments.
Design data models and persistence strategies across relational (Postgres, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB) systems.
Ensure efficient schema evolution, data partitioning, and performance optimization at scale.
Build and evolve APIs and services that expose payroll and analytical data securely and reliably.
Collaborate with front-end teams to support Angular-based applications and workflows.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; guide design discussions and complex implementation efforts.
Influence technical direction across teams and initiatives beyond immediate ownership.
Partner with product, compliance, and security stakeholders to translate business needs into technical solutions.
Drive long-term technical vision while balancing delivery of near-term business value.