Software Engineer- Eng

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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 No
  
  SQL 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, Big Query, 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.

• 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.

• Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and technical coaching.
• Influence technical direction across multiple teams without formal…