Forward Deployed Engineer

Why UKG

At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show customers contribute to real impact. Tens of millions of workers rely on our workforce operating platform daily. We support people getting paid, growing in their careers, and shaping the future of their industries. We never stop learning, challenging the norm, and celebrating wins.

In this role you’ll experience real flexibility, countable benefits, and a collaborative team that succeeds together.

UKG’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice is a small, elite team that embeds directly with our most strategic customers to solve high-value problems that sit just beyond our current product boundaries. We deploy in small pods, move fast, learn the customer’s world, and build things that work in production. The strongest FDEs combine technical depth with curiosity, creativity, perseverance, and customer empathy.

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer you will lead technical discovery, solution design, and hands‑on engineering for strategic customer engagements. You will sit at the intersection of customer needs, product possibility, and production software: turning ambiguous business problems into prototypes, architectures, integrations, and AI‑enabled workflows that create measurable customer impact. At this level you typically own the technical direction for an engagement or major solution area, guide other FDEs, and shape reusable patterns for the broader practice.

Partner directly with customer stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, data, systems, constraints, and opportunities for innovation. Ask sharp questions that reveal the real problem, not just the requested feature or implementation path. Translate ambiguous customer needs into hypotheses, prototypes, technical designs, implementation plans, and operational runbooks. Explore unfamiliar technologies, customer domains, and AI capabilities with curiosity, speed, and sound engineering judgment.

Design and build production‑grade APIs, integrations, workflow automations, data pipelines, internal tools, and customer‑facing technical solutions. Rapidly prototype ideas, test assumptions with customers, and mature the best ideas into maintainable production systems. Integrate UKG with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, data, and related systems using secure, auditable designs. Own technical delivery through discovery, design, build, testing, go‑live, and early operational handoff.

Make pragmatic tradeoffs across speed, quality, scalability, security, maintainability, and customer impact.

Set technical direction for an FDE engagement or major solution area and keep engineering work focused on the customer outcome. Guide other FDEs through architecture reviews, pairing, code reviews, technical planning, and high‑judgment customer moments. Collaborate closely with the engagement PM, customer teams, Product, Engineering, Support, and Security to surface risks, dependencies, and decisions early. Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders.

Navigate difficult delivery moments with creativity, perseverance, and a bias toward making progress.

Contribute reusable components, templates, examples, reference architectures, demos, and implementation notes that accelerate future engagements. Provide clear feedback to Product and Engineering on platform gaps, repeatable customer needs, and opportunities to productize field‑built solutions. Help develop the FDE playbook: better discovery methods, solution patterns, demo assets, tooling, and engineering practices. Identify expansion signals and help define the next high‑value problems the team should solve for the customer.

Identify practical, high‑impact uses of AI within existing enterprise workflows. Prototype and deploy AI‑assisted patterns such as intelligent intake, summarization,…