Lead Software Development 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.

UKG is seeking a highly skilled and influential Lead Software Development Engineer (P4) to join our Shared Services team within Employee Solutions & Experience (ESE). This role is focused on advancing Quality Engineering through scalable test automation, strong software engineering practices, AI-enabled capabilities, and shared platforms that enable product teams to deliver high-quality software at speed.
As a technical lead, you will design and implement modern automation solutions, establish engineering and DevOps best practices, and partner closely with development teams across ESE to improve quality, test coverage, delivery efficiency, and release confidence. You will play a key role in driving quality transformation through reusable automation frameworks, continuous testing, observability, AI-assisted development, and agentic approaches to software validation.
The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with a passion for mentoring others, improving engineering processes, and building reusable solutions that benefit multiple teams across UKG. They will bring the mindset of a software engineer and platform builder, with practical experience applying modern development tools, Claude Code, Model Context Protocol, and AI agents to improve engineering productivity and quality outcomes.
Key Responsibilities
• Design and build scalable test automation frameworks, shared services, libraries, and developer tools.
• Create reusable capabilities for browser, API, integration, contract, performance, accessibility, and end-to-end testing.
• Establish engineering standards for automation architecture, code quality, testability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Integrate automated quality checks, release validations, and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Improve test execution speed, parallelization, diagnostics, stability, and feedback time.
• Build observability into automation platforms using logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerts.
• Correlate test results with build, deployment, application, and production telemetry.
• Partner with development, DevOps, SRE, security, architecture, and release teams to improve delivery quality.
• Mentor engineers and manual testers in software development, automation, DevOps, and AI-assisted engineering.
• Reduce duplicated frameworks and promote common platforms and reusable engineering patterns.
Required Qualifications
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, quality engineering, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or test architecture.
• Strong programming skills in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, or a comparable language.
• Experience designing maintainable automation frameworks or internal engineering platforms.
• Hands-on experience with Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, or similar browser automation technologies.
• Strong experience with API, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing.
• Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or another CI/CD platform.
• Practical knowledge of Git, pull requests, code reviews, build systems, and deployment workflows.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud services, and modern application architectures.
• Knowledge of observability, including logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and failure diagnostics.
• Hands-on experience using Claude Code/Codex or comparable AI coding assistants for substantive engineering work.
• Practical understanding of MCP, tool calling, and agentic application development.
• Ability to evaluate and govern AI-generated code and autonomous workflows.
• Strong technical leadership, communication, and mentoring skills.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience building shared engineering platforms or developer-productivity tools.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, or Splunk.
• Knowledge of performance, security, accessibility, resiliency, and production validation.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, AI evaluation, or multi-agent systems.
• Experience modernizing teams that rely heavily on manual testing or tool-specific automation.
What Success Looks Like
• Product teams adopt common engineering capabilities instead of creating separate automation frameworks.
• CI/CD feedback becomes faster, more reliable, and more actionable.
• Test flakiness, duplicated effort, and automation maintenance costs are reduced.
• AI-assisted development produces measurable improvements in engineering productivity and defect detection.
• Agentic solutions operate with appropriate security, evaluation, governance, and human oversight.
• Manual testers develop stronger programming, automation, DevOps, and AI-engineering skills.
The strongest candidate will think like a software engineer and platform builder who specializes in quality. They should be able to demonstrate systems they have designed and built—not only tools they have used.

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 [email protected]