Principal Product Manager- Platform Infrastructure

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


About the Team & Value Stream

The AI & Platform Value Stream is the engineering backbone of UKG Ready, the teams that determine whether Ready can scale, perform, and evolve at the pace the business demands. We sit within UKG Ready AI & Platform and own the foundational infrastructure, data platforms, AI frameworks, identity systems, and integration capabilities that every domain team in Ready builds on.

Platform Services is the most foundational of these teams. We own the core runtime frameworks: the Jobs Framework, caching infrastructure, multitenant data synchronization, cloud infrastructure provisioning, audit trail systems, blob storage, and the platform resilience capabilities that underpin all of UKG Ready. When you work on Platform Services, your decisions affect every customer, every feature, and every team in the product.

This is not a role for someone who wants to maintain the status quo. UKG Ready is executing against an ambitious long range plan to grow from ~$450M ARR to $1.1B by 2030. Platform resilience, cloud scale modernization, and developer productivity are explicitly identified as prerequisites for that growth. The work this PM drives is a direct enabler of Ready's go to market ambitions: not infrastructure in the background, but foundational investment that determines whether Ready can handle the volume required to reach its targets.

You'll collaborate closely with PMs across the value stream (AI Framework, Analytics Platform, Integration Framework, and Identity & Access) and with engineering, architecture, security, and operations teams across UKG Ready and the broader UKG platform organization.



About the Role

This is a deeply technical, strategically important PM role at the intersection of infrastructure, platform engineering, and cloud modernization. You will own the roadmap for the platform services that power every UKG Ready experience and be responsible for evolving those services from their current state to a cloud native, dynamically scaled, containerized architecture capable of supporting 10x growth in volume.

You'll partner closely with engineering architects, the DevX team, and cross functional stakeholders to drive platform decisions that are felt across the entire Ready product. You must be able to translate complex infrastructure capabilities into measurable business value, make credible tradeoff recommendations in highly technical discussions, and communicate infrastructure strategy clearly to executive leadership.

This role also requires an AI native working style, not as a nice to have, but as a baseline expectation. UKG operates a fully agentic product and development lifecycle: our engineering teams build with AI coding assistants, our PM organization uses AI agents for research, synthesis, and documentation, and the products we ship are themselves AI powered. We're looking for someone who has genuinely internalized this shift, someone who reaches for an AI agent before a spreadsheet, who accelerates their PM work with agentic tools, and who can think about platform architecture through the lens of what AI systems need from infrastructure that human only workloads never required.

You will:

Own the Jobs Framework strategy and evolution. Define the roadmap for UKG Ready's custom Jobs Framework, including the evolution from static job allocation to dynamic, usage based execution that scales based on real time queue depth, priority, and demand patterns across distributed, multithreaded, and asynchronous workloads.

Drive cloud native modernization and GKE migration. Own the containerization roadmap and product strategy for transitioning Platform Services workloads to GKE. Partner with DevX and engineering on predictive, schedule based auto scaling that anticipates payroll cycles, business hours, and seasonal demand patterns.

Own performance and caching platform strategy. Define strategy for broadcaster patterns, in memory and external caching (Redis, Memcached), cache invalidation, and performance tuning, and translate those decisions into measurable latency and reliability outcomes.

Lead multitenant platform reliability. Own POD sync and forwarding architecture, including cross POD data synchronization, communication patterns, and consistency guarantees. Deep familiarity with POD based multitenant SaaS architectures is a day one requirement, not a ramp up item.

Own platform storage and data handling foundations. Define strategy for blob storage, DB storage optimization, and data lifecycle management. Partner with the Analytics Platform team on the dependency boundary between transactional and analytical systems.

Own Infrastructure as Code for Platform Services workloads. Own Terraform based IaC for Platform Services infrastructure and ensure workloads are provisioned and governed consistently within the broader IaC discipline owned by the DevX ROW team.

Own the Audit Trail reporting capability. Define the roadmap for the Audit Trail Report feature set, compliance logging, and data retention policies. (Note: the underlying audit framework is owned by the Integration Framework team; this PM owns the product surface built on top of it.)

Drive security and vulnerability management. Partner with security teams on vulnerability remediation prioritization, security scanning integration, and proactive security initiatives. Platform Services carries shared responsibility for security findings across the Technical substream.

Define the Dimensions HCM integration roadmap. Own platform level Dimensions HCM integration strategy during the current transition period, in close coordination with the Inova Integration Team as it assumes long term ownership.

Enable AI native platform capabilities. Ensure Platform Services is designed for agentic consumers, not just human traffic. AI agents require sub second tool execution latency, deterministic job scheduling for multistep workflows, and cache consistency that static workloads never demanded. Partner with the AI Framework PM to validate SLOs against these requirements and ensure the platform that runs Bryte AI and Project Lighthouse is built to their spec.

Work as an AI native PM and raise the bar for those around you. Use AI agents daily across PRD drafting, technical research, document synthesis, metrics analysis, and stakeholder communications. Model agentic working practices within the team and bring a practitioner's perspective to the infrastructure you're building for. You shouldn't just understand what AI agents need from a platform; you should know that from working with them every day.

Establish developer platform excellence. Drive internal developer experience through reusable platform components, clear interface contracts, and engineering productivity improvements. Well structured interfaces and documentation aren't just good design; they're what makes Platform Services usable in an AI assisted development workflow.

Communicate strategy and roadmap to senior leadership. Translate platform investments into business outcomes (reliability, cost, developer velocity, and scale) for engineering and product leadership.



About You

We're looking for a builder. Someone who is energized by hard technical problems, makes decisions with incomplete information, and earns credibility with engineers by understanding the system, not by deferring to it. This is not a role for a PM who waits for engineering to tell them what's possible. You should be able to walk into an architecture review, hold your own, and walk out having shaped the direction.

We recognize that background takes many forms. We will consider candidates who meet one of the following experience profiles:

Preferred: Technical founder of a startup. You've built something from scratch, owned the full technical and product surface, and made high stakes decisions without a safety net. That experience, the judgment, the urgency, and the firsthand understanding of what it means to ship, is exactly what this role demands.

Strong: Engineering background transitioning into product. 5+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems, platform, or infrastructure, combined with 5+ years of product management in a growth startup or enterprise SaaS environment. You speak engineering fluently because you were one, and you bring that credibility into every roadmap conversation.

Qualified: Senior PM with deep platform focus. 10+ years of product management in enterprise SaaS or a high growth startup, with at least 5 of those years focused on technical platform, infrastructure, or developer tools. You've earned technical credibility through proximity and rigor, and you've demonstrated you can hold your own with principal engineers on architecture decisions.

Regardless of path, you will need to demonstrate the following on day one:

Distributed systems depth. Asynchronous processing, job orchestration frameworks, multithreaded execution, message queues, and background task scheduling at scale. The Jobs Framework is the backbone of Ready's background processing; you need to understand what it's doing and why.

POD based multitenant architecture fluency. This team owns cross POD data synchronization and communication. Tenant isolation, data partitioning, and fairness patterns are not concepts to learn here; they're context you bring.

Cloud native architecture and GKE/Kubernetes experience. Containerization, microservices, horizontal scaling, and cloud migration strategy. Driving a GKE or equivalent migration is a near term deliverable.

Caching and performance expertise. Redis, Memcached, cache invalidation, cache stampede prevention, distributed caching, and the ability to trace a latency problem through the stack.

IaC and DevOps literacy. Terraform, configuration management, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD practices at the platform level.

Audit, compliance, and security awareness. Audit trail systems, SOC2/GDPR/HIPAA requirements, data retention, and vulnerability management lifecycle.

Builder's decision making style. You make calls, you defend them, and you update when the data changes. You don't produce requirements documents that hedge every decision back to engineering.

Cross functional leadership without authority. The ability to align engineering, architecture, security, DevX, and product teams across a globally distributed organization.

Data driven prioritization. System metrics (latency, throughput, error rates, SLOs/SLIs), performance benchmarking, and operational dashboards drive your roadmap decisions.

Executive communication. You can translate a cache invalidation strategy into a business outcome conversation with a VP in two sentences.

AI native working style, required, not preferred. You actively use AI agents in your daily PM workflow: PRD drafting, technical research, document synthesis, metrics analysis, and stakeholder communications. You've worked in an environment where engineers build with AI coding assistants and you understand how that changes how requirements are written and how teams operate. Candidates who treat AI as an occasional tool rather than a core work practice will not be competitive for this role.

Preferred Qualifications

Custom job orchestration framework experience. Familiarity with Quartz, Hangfire, Apache Airflow, Celery, or comparable job scheduling systems.

Experience with blob storage systems and data lifecycle management at scale.

Observability and monitoring experience. Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, and establishing SLOs/SLIs for platform services.

Auto scaling and capacity planning experience. Predictive scaling strategies, schedule based scaling, and resource utilization optimization.

Knowledge of HCM/HRIS integration patterns and enterprise HR data flow architecture.

Security best practices experience. Vulnerability management lifecycle, security scanning toolchain integration, penetration testing response, and secure SDLC.

Advanced degree (MBA, Computer Science, or related field) or equivalent practical experience.



What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days: Deliver GKE migration foundations and containerization phase 1 scope definition with clear sequencing, dependencies, and success criteria. Establish baseline SLO targets for Jobs Framework processing latency and cache hit rates across Platform Services. Complete scope alignment with the Integration Framework team on Audit Framework ownership boundaries. Demonstrate an AI native working rhythm: use agentic tools to drive your own onboarding, synthesize technical documentation, and produce your first roadmap artifacts.

In FY27:

Technical credibility earned. Engineers and architects bring you into hard conversations before decisions are made, not after. You've made defensible architectural tradeoff calls on platform scope, navigated competing approaches with data, and earned a genuine seat at the table where infrastructure direction gets set.

Complex migration navigated. You've driven a high stakes infrastructure initiative involving sequencing, dependency management, and cross team coordination without disrupting active workloads. The engineering team executed against a plan you owned, and the outcomes were measurable.

Platform reliability owned, not monitored. SLOs are established, visible, and trending in the right direction. You built the accountability model, not just the dashboard. When incidents happen, recovery is faster because of decisions you drove.

Developer productivity moved. Domain teams build faster because of investments you prioritized. You identified the friction points slowing internal developers down, translated them into platform requirements, and measured the improvement. Internal customers notice the difference.

Security managed proactively. Security findings don't age in your backlog. You've built a working relationship with security teams, established a prioritization model the engineering team trusts, and maintained compliance without it becoming a crisis each cycle.

Commercial instincts demonstrated. Infrastructure costs are a lever you actively manage, not a byproduct you report on. You can connect a caching architecture decision to a business outcome in two sentences and defend it to a VP.

Agentic consumer requirements owned. The platform meets the demands of AI workloads, not just human traffic. You've had the hard SLO conversations with the AI Framework team, understand what their workloads require, and ensured Platform Services is designed for both.

AI native bar raised for the team. You haven't just adopted agentic working practices yourself; you've modeled them in a way that has shifted how the broader team operates. Spec quality, research velocity, and stakeholder communication are measurably better because of how you've worked.

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]