Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Platform

UKG•Atlanta, GA

85d•$129,500 - $186,100

About The Position

UKG is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to build and maintain our public/private cloud’s PaaS layer (Platform as a Service). This specialized team abstracts the complexities of Infrastructure, Networking, and Security requirements to ensure they are consumed in standardized ways for supporting Applications. These services are built in Linux leveraging various technologies including Go, Ansible, K8s, GKE, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Openstack. This position will partner with Agile development teams to assure smooth integration and deployment of UKG software across the entire cloud infrastructure. This work is in the Engineering Acceleration group supporting internal product teams in their deployments. The ideal candidate will have a background and experience with cloud technologies and a desire to master them. This position may perform work with the U.S. government; therefore, the ideal candidate should be a U.S. Citizen and possess an existing or previous Government Security Clearance, or the ability to obtain an appropriate security clearance is required.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience
Deep expertise in Python or Java development.
1 year+ of GitOps/DevOps experience or, building Infrastructure as Code pipelines or processes to support large teams
Experience working with Kubernetes, Docker, and public cloud deployment platforms
Experience designing and administering CI/CD pipelines
Proven track record of leading and delivering large-scale, complex software projects.
Proficiency with cloud technologies like Azure, AWS, GCP, and version control systems like GitHub.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience
U.S. Citizen
Existing or previous Government Security Clearance preferred, or ability to obtain appropriate security clearance is required

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
Experience and deep understanding GitHub Actions, Argo CD, or similar GitOps and CI/CD platforms for Kubernetes application deployment, release orchestration, traffic routing, and lifecycle management or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.
Extensive experience with GitOps tooling for example GitHub Actions, leveraging Terraform and Ansible to create CI/CD pipeline automation frameworks and container-based deployments.
Extensive experience with software architecture and design patterns, including the ability to design and implement scalable, reliable systems in a DevOps model.
Proficiency in building telemetry or observability as part of the development process.
Strong understanding in DNS architecture and operations, including traffic management, split-horizon DNS, failover strategies, and performance optimization in large-scale distributed systems or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.
Proven experience designing and operating service-to-service routing, including L7 traffic shaping, canary deployments, blue/green releases, and zero-downtime migration strategies or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.
Experience with API gateway and edge routing technologies (e.g., NGINX, Envoy, Kong, or cloud-native equivalents), including authentication, rate limiting, and policy enforcement or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.
Hands-on experience with TLS/mTLS, certificate lifecycle management, and secure service-to-service communication in a Kubernetes or microservices environment or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.
Deep understanding of Kubernetes operators, networking primitives, including Services, Ingress, Gateway API, and service mesh architectures (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), with hands-on experience operating them at scale or a readiness and deep interest to learn and master.

Responsibilities

Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code for various software applications and systems.
Understand and work in a DevOps Model, taking ownership from working with product management on requirements to design, develop, test, deploy and maintain the software in production.
Develop and maintain infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools.
Contribute to the design, development, and deployment of complex software applications and systems, ensuring they meet high standards of quality and performance.
Manage execution and delivery of features and projects, negotiating project priorities and deadlines, ensuring successful and timely completion, with quality.
Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code and infrastructure scripts using Bash, Python, PowerShell, or similar languages.
Participate in design reviews with peers and stakeholders and in the architectural design of new features and systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
Review code developed by other developers, provide feedback and maintain a high bar of technical excellence to ensure code is adhering to industry standard best practices like coding guidelines, elegant, efficient and maintainable code, with observability built from ground up, unit tests etc.
Build testable software, define tests, participate in the testing process, automate tests using tools (e.g., Junit, Selenium) and Design Patterns leveraging the test automation pyramid as the guide.
Maintain the health and quality of services and incidents, proactively identifying and resolving issues. Utilize service health indicators and telemetry for action providing recommendations to optimize performance. Conduct thorough root cause analysis and drive the implementation of measures to prevent future recurrences.
Properly document new features, enhancements or fixes to the product, contributing to training materials.