Principal Software Engineer- Architectual Leader

Principal Software Engineer

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.

This Principal Software Engineer 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.

• Architecture & Technical Leadership
• 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.
• Payroll Processing Systems
• 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.
• AI & Intelligent Systems Enablement
• 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.
• Data & Platform Engineering
• Design data models and persistence strategies across relational (Postgres, MySQL) and No
  
  SQL (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.
• Mentorship & Cross-Team Influence
• 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.

• 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  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 product ionize analytical or intelligent capabilities.

• 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,…