Sr. Staff Software Engineer- Eng

Sr. Staff Software Engineer 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. About the Role We are seeking a Sr. Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for agentic AI at UKG and scale it across the organization. You will define how UKG builds agents on Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) and other enterprise agentic platforms, own the reference architecture that consuming teams build on, and turn ambiguous business problems into technical charters that multiple teams execute against. You will operate ahead of the current roadmap, make platform bets and defend them to senior engineering and product leadership, and raise the ceiling of what the organization is capable of building. As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible for the design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of highly complex agentic systems. Duties and Responsibilities Technical Strategy and Direction: Own the technical strategy and vision for agentic AI across the Agentic Acceleration Group and its consuming value streams, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices. Architectural Excellence: Own the reference architecture for agentic systems at UKG: multi-agent coordination patterns, task delegation workflows, agent communication protocols, and the shared tool and MCP layers reused across teams. Agent Development and Platform Integration: Design, build, and deploy production-grade AI agents using Google ADK and other agentic platforms (LangGraph, N8N, Temporal, etc.). Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code for agent workflows, tool integrations, and multi-agent orchestration. Operational Excellence and Cost Ownership: Ensure the health and quality of agent-powered services, proactively identifying and addressing issues. Utilize service health indicators, agent performance metrics (task success rates, latency, cost), and telemetry for action. Agent Safety and Governance: Define the organization's guardrail standards for autonomous action on customer payroll and HR data: permission boundaries, human-in-the-loop thresholds, audit trails, and blast-radius limits. Partner with Security, Legal, and Privacy to make those standards enforceable, and gate production launches against them. Engineering Excellence and Testing: Define the agent evaluation bar for the organization: what "good" means for task success rate, cost per task, and safety, and gate production launches against it. Advocate for and implement best quality practices for agentic systems, hold a high bar for engineering excellence, and guide teams in maintaining service quality through comprehensive testing (including agent evaluation, prompt testing, and tool validation). Mentorship and Influence: Grow the organization's agentic bench. Mentor Senior and Staff engineers, sponsor them into technical leadership, and raise the ceiling of what the organization can build. Turn hard-won lessons into reusable patterns, internal guidance, and design reviews that other teams depend on. Stay current with emerging agentic AI technologies and platforms, advocating for their adoption where appropriate to drive innovation and productivity enhancement across the organization. Represent UKG with platform partners including Google (Vertex AI, ADK) and Anthropic to shape their roadmap and secure early access, and make org-wide adoption calls on emerging frameworks. Basic 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 development experience, with 3+ years building agentic AI systems or LLM-powered applications in production at scale. Proven track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams, not just leading one. Experience taking an agentic system from prototype to production at enterprise scale: multi-tenant, regulated data, SLA-backed. Hands-on experience building production agents using platforms such as Google ADK, Anthropic Claude SDK, LangChain, LangGraph, or similar agentic frameworks. Experience designing and implementing multi-agent systems, agent orchestration patterns, and tool-use architectures. Deep expertise in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, JavaScript, or TypeScript. Proven track record of leading and delivering large-scale, complex software projects including agentic AI initiatives. Strong understanding of cloud technologies and DevOps principles, including GCP (Vertex AI, Google ADK), Azure (Azure OpenAI), or AWS (Bedrock), and version control systems like GitHub. Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail, with a commitment to delivering high-quality agent-powered solutions. Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a demonstrated ability to influence and drive agentic AI technical decisions across the organization and translate agent capabilities to non-technical stakeholders. Preferred Qualifications Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Demonstrated ability to define evaluation and safety standards that other teams adopted. Experience owning inference cost and model-selection strategy at scale. Proficiency in building telemetry and observability for agentic systems (execution tracing, decision logging, cost monitoring, success rate tracking). Experience building or contributing to MCP servers and reusable tool layers consumed by other teams. Understanding of RAG patterns, context engineering, and agentic workflow design. Experience shaping vendor or platform partner roadmaps through early-access or design-partner programs. Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools. Knowledge of agile development methodologies. Experience in a complex, matrixed organization. Demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion initiatives. Familiarity with developing accessible technologies. 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. Equal Opportunity Employer UKG is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories. The pay range for this position is $145,600 to $209,300. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG's benefits and rewards at UKG, Inc.