Forward Deployed Engineer

Position: Staff Forward Deployed Engineer
Job description

Company and benefits

Job IDSTAFF
019341

Employment Type

Regular Work  Style hybrid Location Seattle ,WA,United States Travel Up  to 50%
Role Staff 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 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.

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer About the TeamUKG'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 the current product boundary. 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. They are comfortable with ambiguity because they are motivated by discovery: learning unfamiliar domains, finding the real problem, building the first working version, and turning what works into reusable capabilities for the broader platform.

We are inspired by the best forward-deployed and outcome-delivery organizations in enterprise technology. Our operating model is simple: get close to the customer, define the outcome precisely, build something real, and use what we learn in the field to shape the future of the product.

The Role 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 will typically own the technical direction for an engagement or major solution area, guide other FDEs, and shape reusable patterns for the broader practice. You are close to the customer and close to the code. You are expected to build, communicate, unblock, and raise the quality of the solution around you.

Enterprise HCM, Payroll, or Workforce Management experience is helpful, but it is not the gatekeeper. We are looking for strong engineers who love learning unfamiliar domains, designing novel solutions, and pushing through ambiguity until something works in the real world.

What You Will DoOwn Technical Discovery and Invention 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.

Identify when a field-built solution should become a reusable platform capability or reference pattern.

Build and Ship Production Solutions 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.

Lead the Engineering Pod Set technical direction for an FDE…