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 – Engineering role serves as a technical authority and architectural leader for UKG’s AAG team, which is responsible for building LLM-powered AI agents and intelligent assistants across UKG products
In this role, you will help define and deliver scalable agentic AI capabilities, architectures, frameworks, APIs, and reusable components that enable UKG product teams to rapidly build and integrate secure, reliable, and context-aware AI experiences. This includes establishing patterns for agent orchestration, tool and function calling, enterprise data integration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory, evaluation, guardrails, observability, and responsible AI. You will work in an agile environment, partnering closely with engineers, product managers, architects, AI specialists, and senior leadership across the UKG portfolio.
You will be responsible not only for building production-grade AI agents and assistants, but also for defining how agentic capabilities should be designed, evaluated, adopted, governed, and operated across UKG products. You will champion an AI-first engineering mindset, leveraging modern LLM and agentic AI technologies to accelerate product innovation, improve customer and employee experiences, enhance engineering productivity, and transform how UKG builds and operates intelligent software.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Define and evolve the architecture for LLM-powered AI agents, intelligent assistants, and shared agentic capabilities across UKG products, including HCM, WFM, HRSD, and Genesis.
- Drive architectural decisions across agent orchestration, multi-agent workflows, APIs, reusable frameworks, tool and function calling, enterprise data integration, RAG, memory, model selection, and integration patterns.
- Design extensible and reusable agentic capabilities that can be adopted across multiple UKG products while accommodating product-specific requirements and business contexts.
- Ensure AI systems are designed for high availability, scalability, accuracy, security, privacy, observability, auditability, responsible AI, and regulatory compliance.
- Establish robust approaches for AI-agent evaluation, hallucination detection, guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, prompt and model versioning, and continuous quality improvement.
- Lead architecture and design reviews, setting standards for agent design, code quality, model and response quality, operational readiness, and cross-product adoption.
- Provide technical direction and mentorship to engineering teams while influencing the broader agentic AI strategy and engineering practices across UKG.
Mentorship & Cross-Team Influence
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; guide design discussions and complex implementation efforts.
- Influence technical direction across multiple teams and initiatives beyond immediate ownership.
- Partner with product, security, compliance, and domain engineering stakeholders to translate portfolio needs into durable platform solutions.
- Drive long-term technical vision while balancing near-term delivery, adoption, and operational support needs.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep experience designing and building scalable distributed systems, enterprise platforms, APIs, and cloud- native services.
- Hands- on experience designing, building, and productionizing LLM- powered applications, AI agents, intelligent assistants, or other generative AI solutions.
- Strong understanding of agentic AI concepts and patterns, including agent orchestration, tool and function calling, RAG, memory, prompt engineering, model selection, evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Experience integrating AI systems with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, identity and access controls, and business workflows.
- Experience building and operating secure, observable, resilient, and business- critical AI capabilities consumed across multiple products or engineering teams.
- Understanding of responsible AI practices, including data privacy, security, explainability, auditability, bias mitigation, hallucination management, and regulatory compliance.
- Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple teams or organizations, establishing architectural standards, and driving adoption of shared frameworks and engineering practices.
- Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous product or business requirements into clear, extensible technical designs.
- Proven ability to lead highly complex, cross- functional initiatives involving engineering, product management, architecture, AI/ML, data, security, and compliance teams.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, raise engineering standards, and deliver AI capabilities with significant customer and business impact.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with LLM and agentic AI frameworks, model providers, vector databases, semantic search, knowledge graphs, or enterprise RAG architectures.
- Familiarity with advanced agentic patterns such as multi-agent collaboration, planning and reasoning, dynamic tool selection, agent memory, and autonomous workflow execution.
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI agents, including response quality, task completion, groundedness, hallucination detection, safety, latency, and cost.
- Experience implementing LLMOps or MLOps practices, including prompt and model versioning, experimentation, monitoring, tracing, feedback collection, and continuous improvement.
- Experience designing AI systems with strict requirements for security, responsible AI, compliance, auditability, data privacy, explainability, and tenant isolation.
- Experience integrating conversational or agentic AI experiences with web applications, including Angular-based user interfaces.
- Background in event-driven, workflow-based, service-oriented, batch, or hybrid processing architectures.
- Experience modernizing legacy enterprise applications by introducing AI agents, intelligent automation, or reusable AI platform capabilities.
- Experience leading large-scale technical transformations and successfully moving AI solutions from experimentation to secure, production-grade adoption.
UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work. With the world's largest collection of workforce insights, and people-first AI, our ability to reveal unseen ways to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent, is unmatched. It's this expertise that equips our customers with the intelligence to solve any challenge in any industry — because great organizations know their workforce is their competitive edge. Learn more at ukg.com.
UKG is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace, including the recruitment process.
For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email [email protected]
