Director - Site Reliability Engineering

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.

UKG is seeking a seasoned Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to help lead and shape reliability at enterprise scale. You will be responsible for the reliability, resilience, and operational excellence of UKG’s platforms worldwide.

This is a high-impact leadership role within a mature, mission-critical environment. You will inherit and lead an established SRE organization responsible for a large, complex ecosystem comprising hundreds of applications across a hybrid infrastructure.

Success in this role calls for strong systems thinking, operational leadership at scale, and the ability to influence across boundaries. You will drive consistent reliability practices across diverse technologies, modernize how reliability is delivered, and lead globally distributed teams in service of always-on, customer-critical platforms.

• Responsible for reliability outcomes across a large, heterogeneous application portfolio, including availability, performance, scalability, and recoverability
• Ensure applications meet defined reliability expectations as they operate on both on-prem and cloud platforms
• Lead and participate in major incident response, acting as a senior escalation point and ensuring effective executive communication
• Drive post-incident learning and systemic improvements to reduce repeat issues

• Lead teams responsible for understanding how applications behave in production, including runtime performance, resource utilization, and failure modes
• Partner with Infrastructure, Cloud, Security, and Product Engineering teams to address cross-layer reliability concerns
• Establish standards for operational readiness, release safety, capacity planning, and disaster recovery across platforms

• Apply Site Reliability Engineering principles pragmatically across both legacy and cloud-native systems, including:
• SLOs and reliability targets
• Error budgets and risk-based decision-making
• Toil identification and reduction
• Automation and self-healing where appropriate
• Observability to support incident response, performance analysis, and capacity management
• Ensure SRE practices are consistent in intent but adapted in implementation across different technologies and environments

• Lead and develop SRE managers and engineers across a global organization
• Inherit existing teams and improve clarity of ownership, execution discipline, and engagement
• Hire and develop senior SRE leaders capable of operating across both cloud and enterprise platforms

• Translate business priorities into reliability-focused technical initiatives
• Partner with senior Product and Engineering leadership to balance delivery velocity, reliability, and operational risk
• Own and execute against a portion of the SRE roadmap, ensuring transparency, prioritization, and measurable outcomes
• Advocate for reliability improvements using data, production insight, and operational experience

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, SRE, or related disciplines
• Proven experience leading established, globally distributed engineering organizations
• Strong understanding of production systems and application behavior at scale
• Experience operating and leading teams across hybrid environments (on-prem and public cloud)
• Demonstrated ability to influence outcomes in a matrixed enterprise environment
• Experience owning incident…