Sr Principal, Sales Strategy & Operations

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.

As the Sr Principal, Sales Incentive Strategy & Operations, you will lead the strategy, design, governance, and operational execution of UKG’s global sales incentive ecosystem. This role is responsible for ensuring sales compensation programs, quota methodologies, and revenue-driving incentive initiatives are aligned to UKG’s Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy, growth objectives, and evolving business priorities across HCM, payroll, workforce management, and SaaS recurring revenue motions.

You will serve as a strategic bridge across Sales, Revenue Operations, Finance, HR, Legal, and Executive Leadership, overseeing the full sales incentive revenue cycle — from annual plan design and quota setting through policy governance, operational execution, payout alignment, analytics, and plan effectiveness reviews. This leader will drive consistency and scalability across multiple work streams and stakeholder groups while ensuring compensation programs motivate the right sales behaviors and support profitable growth.

This role requires deep expertise in enterprise SaaS sales compensation strategy, quota and territory alignment, SPIFF administration, President’s Club governance, policy management, and operational excellence in complex global sales organizations. You will lead a team of sales compensation and revenue operations professionals while acting as a trusted advisor to senior GTM leadership.

This is a people manager role reporting to the Sr. Director, Sales Compensation.

• Lead the end-to-end strategy, design, modeling, governance, and execution of UKG’s global sales compensation programs, including annual incentive plans, quota frameworks, SPIFFs, accelerators, contests, and President’s Club programs
• Own the full sales incentive revenue cycle across multiple workstream owners, ensuring alignment between Compensation, Revenue Operations, Sales Leadership, Finance, HR, Payroll, Legal, and Systems teams
• Partner closely with Revenue Operations and GTM leadership on quota setting methodologies, territory alignment, coverage modeling, and capacity planning to ensure incentive plans support UKG’s revenue growth strategy
• Develop scalable compensation frameworks that support multiple sales motions, including new logo acquisition, customer expansion, channel/partner sales, overlay organizations, and recurring SaaS revenue models
• Serve as a strategic advisor to executive leadership on compensation philosophy, sales performance trends, plan effectiveness, and incentive-driven business outcomes
• Lead annual sales compensation planning cycles, including plan design, financial modeling, earnings distribution analysis, communication strategies, implementation readiness, and post-launch governance
• Govern Global Sales Operations Policies (GSOPs), compensation plan terms and conditions, exception management processes, and policy interpretation to ensure consistency, compliance, and operational integrity
• Partner with systems, analytics, and operations teams to translate business requirements into scalable compensation administration and reporting solutions
• Oversee incentive analytics and performance reporting, including attainment trends, quota health, pay-for-performance analysis, and fiscal impact assessments
• Drive ongoing evaluation and optimization of incentive programs using market benchmarking, competitive intelligence, internal performance data, and seller feedback
• Lead operational governance for President’s Club and other recognition programs, including eligibility criteria,…