Sr Principal Software Engineer

Our inclusive culture, active and engaged employee resource groups, and caring leaders value every voice and support you in doing the best work of your career. If you're passionate about our purpose - people -then we can't wait to support whatever gives you purpose. We're united by purpose, inspired by you.

Tech Stack: Java, Python, Django, Spring Boot, Microservices, Kafka, Kubernetes, Cloud (AWS/GCP), System Design, Security

About the Role:

As a Senior Principal Engineer, you are a strategic technical leader working across teams and products. You'll define architecture, scale distributed systems, and solve complex business-technology problems using Java and Python. This role combines hands-on excellence with deep mentorship, architectural foresight, and product influence.

Key Responsibilities:

Own the architecture and technical vision for critical platform components and services.
Design and implement scalable systems using Java and Python-based frameworks (Spring Boot, Django).
Influence technology roadmap, system performance goals, and design decisions across the organization.
Partner with Product, and DevOps to drive technical excellence and platform scalability.
Lead engineering-wide initiatives like security hardening, reliability improvements.
Mentor and lead engineers; build and evangelize reusable patterns, tooling, and architecture artifacts.

Required Skills & Experience:

12+ years in backend engineering with deep experience in both Java (Spring Boot) and Python (Django).
Proven track record of designing high-availability, low-latency, large-scale systems in production.
Expertise in cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, service meshes, and API gateways.
Deep experience with architectural trade-offs: monolith vs microservices, sync vs async, caching strategies, event-driven design.
Strong systems-level thinking: memory, CPU, concurrency, multithreading, logging, tracing, debugging.
Experience influencing or authoring platform standards, contributing to tech strategy, and long-term engineering planning.

Preferred Qualifications:

Open-source contributions or thought leadership (conferences, blogs, whitepapers).

Experience integrating ML/AI or data engineering pipelines into production applications.

Familiarity with compliance, security, and large-scale observability practices.

Where we're going

UKG is on the cusp of something truly special. Worldwide, we already hold the #1 market share position for workforce management and the #2 position for human capital management. Tens of millions of frontline workers start and end their days with our software, with billions of shifts managed annually through UKG solutions today. Yet it's our AI-powered product portfolio designed to support customers of all sizes, industries, and geographies that will propel us into an even brighter tomorrow!

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]