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.

Role Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to join the engineering team for the Ready product. This role is focused on delivering high-quality software within sprint execution, building critical product features, and serving as the technical lead for the team on design, implementation, troubleshooting, and engineering best practices.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will actively participate in daily sprint transactions, write production-quality code, review technical designs, unblock engineers, and drive implementation of complex features. The ideal candidate is a strong developer with deep Java and database expertise, a practical understanding of cloud-native services, and the ability to learn new technologies quickly.

This role requires an engineer who can balance hands-on coding with team-level technical guidance. You will help translate requirements into technical solutions, ensure sprint commitments are delivered with quality, and support the team in building scalable, observable, performant, and reliable enterprise software.

Responsibilities

Sprint Delivery & Hands-on Development

Actively participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily stand-ups, technical design discussions, implementation, code reviews, testing, and production readiness activities.
Own and deliver critical features within the sprint by writing clean, maintainable, secure, and production-ready code.
Break down complex requirements into technical tasks, estimate effort, identify dependencies, and help the team meet sprint goals.
Collaborate closely with product owners, architects, QA engineers, SRE teams, and peer developers to deliver high-quality product capabilities.
Take accountability for feature delivery from design through development, testing, deployment, observability, and support.

Technical Lead for the Team

Act as the technical lead for the scrum team, guiding day-to-day technical decisions and ensuring alignment with product architecture and engineering standards.
Lead technical discussions at the team level, evaluate solution options, and help the team make practical, scalable, and maintainable design choices.
Review code, provide design feedback, mentor developers, and raise the overall engineering quality of the team.
Partner with senior technical leaders and architects to implement roadmap items while keeping the team focused on sprint execution.
Identify technical risks early and work with the team to resolve blockers, dependencies, and implementation challenges.

Software Engineering

Design and develop backend services, APIs, workflows, integrations, and data-driven features using Java and related enterprise technologies.
Build scalable, reliable, and maintainable services that support enterprise product requirements.
Apply strong object-oriented design, clean coding practices, design patterns, automated testing, and secure development principles.
Contribute to service design, API contracts, data models, integration patterns, and implementation approaches.
Quickly learn new frameworks, tools, platforms, and technologies required for product delivery.

Observability, Reliability & Troubleshooting

Implement and improve logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, and alerting for features and services owned by the team.
Use observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Splunk, Datadog, or similar platforms to diagnose issues and improve service health.
Troubleshoot technical issues across application code, APIs, database queries, integrations, deployment pipelines, and runtime environments.
Participate in production support, root-cause analysis, defect resolution, and post-release stabilization activities.
Improve reliability through automation, better diagnostics, resilient design, and proactive issue prevention.

Performance & Database Engineering

Develop performant application code and optimize services for latency, throughput, scalability, and resource efficiency.
Work with relational database technologies, SQL, schema design, indexing, query optimization, transactions, and data access patterns.
Analyze and resolve performance bottlenecks in application services, APIs, and database interactions.
Contribute to load testing, profiling, caching strategies, and capacity-related improvements as needed.
Ensure database and application changes are designed for scale, maintainability, and operational stability.

AI-first Engineering Practices

Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly to improve coding, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and developer productivity.
Stay current with AI trends, developer agents, automation tools, and practical use cases that can improve engineering execution.
Identify opportunities where AI tools or agents can help accelerate sprint delivery, improve quality, or reduce repetitive engineering work.
Follow security, privacy, and governance expectations while using AI-assisted engineering tools.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong hands-on development experience in enterprise software products.
Strong proficiency in Java, including backend service development, object-oriented design, concurrency, debugging, and performance-aware coding.
Strong experience with relational databases, SQL, schema design, indexing, query optimization, and transaction management.
Experience building microservices, REST APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications.
Hands-on experience with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, code reviews, source control, and agile software delivery.
Good understanding of observability practices including logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
Ability to troubleshoot complex technical issues across application, database, integration, and runtime layers.
Experience contributing to sprint planning, feature delivery, technical task breakdown, and team-level execution.
Ability to act as a technical lead for a team while remaining hands-on and actively coding.
Ability to learn new technologies quickly and apply them effectively in product development.
Good communication, collaboration, ownership, and problem-solving skills.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working on enterprise SaaS products or large-scale cloud-native applications.
Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Experience with Kubernetes, containers, messaging platforms, distributed caching, and event-driven systems.
Experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana, Splunk, Datadog, or similar platforms.
Experience with performance testing, profiling, capacity analysis, and production diagnostics.
Experience using AI coding assistants, developer agents, or automation tools in the software development lifecycle.
Experience mentoring developers, leading technical implementation within a scrum team, and improving team engineering practices.
Strong understanding of secure coding, data protection, and enterprise application design principles.

Key Attributes

Strong hands-on developer who is ready to write code every sprint.
Practical technical lead who helps the team make good engineering decisions and deliver commitments.
Fast learner who can quickly understand new technologies, tools, and product areas.
Problem solver who can troubleshoot issues deeply and drive them to resolution.
Quality-focused engineer with strong ownership of design, code, testing, performance, and support.
Collaborative team player who works effectively with product, QA, architecture, operations, and peer engineering teams.

Company Overview

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.

Disability Accommodation in the Application and Interview Process

For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email [HIDDEN TEXT]

Staff Software Engineer- Eng