Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect

UKG•Atlanta, GA

1d•$207,400 - $298,100

About The Position

UKG is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead architecture and design for the UKG Ready SMB product family. This strategic, hands-on individual contributor role focuses on integrating AI responsibly at scale, driving M&A technical outcomes, and ensuring the product can meet aggressive growth targets. The role involves defining architecture, developing governance frameworks, designing AI/ML integration patterns, leading technical due diligence for acquisitions, and translating product needs into architectural decisions. The engineer will also set platform standards for cloud, CI/CD, and SRE practices, establish responsible AI guardrails, and mentor other engineers. The position requires a strong customer focus and excellent communication skills, with key deliverables including an architecture roadmap, AI integration patterns, M&A playbooks, and demonstrable improvements in time-to-market and operational reliability.

Requirements

~12+ years engineering experience, with substantial time leading architecture for large SaaS products and proven individual technical leadership at scale (or equivalent).
Hands-on experience designing and operating multi-tenant, API-first SaaS systems supporting large numbers of customers and multiple operational tiers.
Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML (including LLM/generative features) into production products — defining serving topologies, MLOps, monitoring and governance.
Direct involvement in technical due diligence and post-close technical integration for acquisitions, including data migration, security and compliance assessments.
Deep knowledge of public cloud architectures (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration, API design, eventing/streaming and data platform patterns (ETL/ELT, feature stores, data contracts).
Strong background in SRE practices, observability (metrics/logs/traces), capacity planning and secure architecture for customer data.
Proven ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders; exceptional documentation and architecture decision skills.
Advanced degree (MS/PhD) preferred but not required if experience demonstrates equivalent technical stature.

Nice To Haves

Prior Senior Principal Engineer/Architect experience (or equivalent senior technical role).
Track record of public speaking, patents, or publications in scalable systems or AI in production.
Experience with cost-efficient inference strategies, responsible AI tooling (bias testing, explainability), and model lifecycle management.
Experience with SMB/mid-market customer operations and the commercial constraints that shape product design.
Experience in regulated industries or privacy-sensitive product engineering.

Responsibilities

Define, communicate and own the Ready SMB architecture to support 55K+ customers today and a product footprint that must scale to the company’s $1.2B revenue target — including tenancy models, service boundaries, performance/cost tradeoffs, extensibility and safe upgrade paths.
Develop and maintain architectural standards and governance frameworks tailored to HCM requirements, including compliance, data privacy, and security.
Design production-grade patterns for embedding generative AI and ML features into Ready: model serving patterns, inference topology (edge vs. centralized), latency / throughput SLAs, MLOps pipelines, evaluation & rollout strategies, and monitoring/rollback controls.
Lead technical diligence for acquisitions affecting Ready: evaluate architecture fit, identify integration risks (data, security, compliance), design migration/integration plans, and lead or advise post-close execution to minimize customer and delivery risk.
Translate product and customer needs (sales/professional services/CS constraints) into architecture decisions that enable configurability, localization, performance tiers, and integrations with customer systems.
Set platform standards for cloud, CI/CD, container orchestration (Kubernetes), observability, capacity planning and SRE practices that deliver predictable ops at scale and control operating cost as the product grows.
Establish guardrails for data privacy, model governance, explainability, bias mitigation and auditability appropriate to Ready’s customer base and regulatory footprint.
Own high-risk or high-impact technical work (POCs, performance optimizations, complex integrations), mentor architects and senior engineers, and lead architecture reviews and decision records.
Produce high-fidelity architecture artifacts: decision records, integration playbooks, runbooks, API and data contracts, and M&A intake/checklists.
Be extremely customer-oriented, have empathy for the users and have accountability & ownership of the Ready solution.
Leading upstream and downstream influence and communication as well as advising teams on executive leadership.