Why UKG:
At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform. Helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That's what we do.
We never stop learning. We never stop challenging the norm. We push for better, and we celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you'll get flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters-and so do you.
About The Role:
The Staff Software Engineer- Eng is a senior individual contributor role within UKG's Payroll engineering organization. This position is for experienced engineers who operate as technical leaders across teams, owning complex problem spaces and driving the design, delivery, and operational excellence of critical payroll capabilities within UKG's SaaS platform.
In this role, you will work at a system level, leading complex initiatives that span services and teams. You will remain deeply hands-on while influencing technical direction, mentoring engineers, and ensuring UKG's payroll systems meet the highest standards for correctness, scalability, security, and compliance in a regulated domain.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership & System Ownership
Act as the technical lead for one or more major payroll domains, services, or processing flows.
Drive the design and delivery of cross-team initiatives that impact system reliability, performance, and scalability.
Make and communicate sound technical decisions within your domain, aligning with architectural standards and long-term platform goals.
Identify systemic risks, technical debt, and architectural gaps, and lead efforts to address.
Payroll Processing and Domain Experience
Design and evolve high-volume payroll processing systems with strict requirements for accuracy, auditability, and determinism.
Own complex payroll logic, edge cases, and regulatory-driven changes across multiple geographies or tenants.
Ensure payroll data flows, calculations, and integrations are resilient, traceable, and compliant.
Lead deep technical investigations into production incidents, payroll discrepancies, and performance issues.
System Design and Architecture
Design scalable backend services and APIs using modern architectural patterns (microservices, event-driven systems, batch/streaming hybrids).Apply distributed systems principles including idempotency, data consistency, fault tolerance, and back-pressure.
Guide data modeling and storage decisions across relational and NoSQL technologies.
Drive adoption of modern patterns such as domain-driven design, contract-first APIs, and asynchronous messaging.
Cloud & Platform Engineering (Google Cloud)
Design, build, and operate services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Leverage GCP services such as GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Spanner, and Cloud Storage where appropriate.
Ensure cloud-native best practices for scalability, cost efficiency, security, and reliability.
Partner with platform teams on infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and environment standardization.
Engineering Excellence
Set and uphold high standards for code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
Champion automated testing, deployment, and rollback strategies.
Design for resiliency using patterns such as retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation.
Improve system observability through structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
Mentorship & Cross-Team Influence
Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and technical coaching.
Influence technical direction across multiple teams without formal authority.
Lead design reviews and contribute to technical standards and best practices.
Share knowledge through documentation, internal forums, and technical presentations.
Emerging & Relevant Technologies
Apply modern development practices including:
.NET Core and modern C# for backend services
Event streaming and messaging (e.g., Pub/Sub, Kafka)
Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
API design standards (REST, gRPC, OpenAPI)
Data processing and analytics integrations
Evaluate and responsibly adopt new technologies that improve system reliability, developer productivity, or customer outcomes.Collaborate with AI and data teams to integrate intelligent validation, automation, or anomaly detection into payroll workflows.
Basic Qualifications:
6+years of professional software engineering experience.
Proven experience leading complex technical initiatives in large-scale SaaS or enterprise systems.
Strong hands-on expertise with .NET Core and backend service development.
Deep experience with distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
Significant experience designing and operating systems on Google Cloud Platform.
Ability to drive technical direction through influence, collaboration, and strong technical judgment.
Preferred Qualifications :
Experience in payroll, HCM, financial services, or other highly regulated domains.
Hands-on experience with GCP services such as GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, or Spanner.
Experience with event-driven, batch, or hybrid payroll processing architectures.
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform).
Experience modernizing legacy systems or leading multi-phase refactoring efforts.
Exposure to AI/ML-enabled systems in production environments.
Experience supporting multi-tenant SaaS platforms at scale.
Company Overview:
UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work. With the world's largest collection of workforce insights, and people-first AI, our ability to reveal unseen ways to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent, is unmatched. It's this expertise that equips our customers with the intelligence to solve any challenge in any industry - because great organizations know their workforce is their competitive edge. Learn more at ukg.com.
Equal Opportunity Employer
UKG is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories. View The EEO Know Your Rights poster UKG participates in E-Verify. View the E-Verify posters here.
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
Disability Accommodation in the Application and Interview Process
For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email UKGCareers@ukg.com.
The pay range for this position is $129,500.00 to $186,100.00. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG's benefits and rewards at https://www.ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits
It is the policy of Ultimate Software to promote and assure equal employment opportunity for all current and prospective Peeps without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, familial status, sexual orientation, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, veteran status, and any other legally protected status entitled to protection under federal, state, or local anti-discrimination laws. This policy governs all matters related to recruitment, advertising, and initial selection of employment. It shall also apply to all other aspects of employment, including, but not limited to, compensation, promotion, demotion, transfer, lay-offs, terminations, leave of absence, and training opportunities.
