Principal Engineer

UKG; Dadri; Hybrid; INR 3,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

UKG seeks a seasoned Technical Leadership & Architecture executive to define the architectural vision for the Ready product, ensuring scalability, security, and long-term extensibility. You will shape core technology decisions and partner with engineering leadership, product management, and cross-functional teams to drive the technical roadmap.

As a hands-on leader, you will mentor teams, advance platform observability, reliability, and performance engineering, and oversee AI-enabled engineering

Qualifications

• 16+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Java and backend service design.
• Experience designing large-scale distributed systems and microservices.
• Proven ability to lead architecture discussions and define roadmaps.
• Hands-on expertise with cloud platforms and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive architectural vision for the Ready product.
• Lead evaluation and evolution of core technology stack.
• Define technical roadmap with engineering leadership and stakeholders.
• Lead architecture reviews and technical decision-making.
• Provide direction across multiple teams for enterprise standards and security.
• Lead post-incident reviews and reliability improvements.

Skills

Java

Leadership

Mentoring

Cloud platforms

Observability

Architectural vision

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Job description

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and drive the architectural vision for the Ready product, ensuring scalability, resiliency, performance, maintainability, and long-term extensibility.
• Lead the evaluation, selection, and evolution of the core technology stack, including application frameworks, cloud-native services, database technologies, observability tools, messaging systems, and AI-enabled engineering capabilities.
• Define and influence the technical roadmap in partnership with engineering leadership, product management, architecture, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Lead architecture reviews, design discussions, and technical decision-making for complex product and platform initiatives.
• Provide technical direction across multiple teams and ensure alignment with enterprise engineering standards, security expectations, and operational goals.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and engineering practices to continuously improve product capabilities, developer productivity, and system reliability.

Software Engineering & Platform Development

• Design and build highly scalable, secure, and reliable cloud-native services using Java and related enterprise technologies.
• Lead the development of distributed systems, APIs, backend services, event-driven workflows, and data-intensive applications.
• Drive modernization initiatives that improve system performance, scalability, maintainability, and engineering velocity.
• Establish and promote engineering best practices around code quality, testing, automation, design patterns, performance optimization, and maintainable architecture.
• Lead complex cross-functional engineering initiatives that require coordination across multiple teams, systems, and stakeholders.
• Ensure the Ready product is built with an enterprise-level mindset, including strong consideration for scalability, compliance, security, availability, customer experience, and operational readiness.

Observability, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Drive platform-wide improvements in observability, monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and service health management.
• Define and implement observability standards using platforms and tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, or similar technologies.
• Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex production issues, performance bottlenecks, system failures, and reliability concerns.
• Partner with engineering, operations, and SRE teams to define service-level objectives, operational metrics, error budgets, incident response practices, and reliability improvement plans.
• Lead post-incident reviews and ensure corrective actions result in long-term improvements to architecture, automation, resiliency, and monitoring.
• Champion proactive engineering practices that improve product stability, reduce operational risk, and enhance customer trust.

Performance Engineering & Scalability

• Drive performance tuning across application services, database layers, APIs, integration points, and distributed system components.
• Identify and resolve scalability challenges in high-volume, enterprise-grade SaaS environments.
• Lead capacity planning, load testing, profiling, query optimization, caching strategies, and performance benchmarking efforts.
• Ensure that technical designs account for throughput, latency, concurrency, data growth, resiliency, and cost efficiency.
• Partner with teams to establish measurable performance goals and continuously improve system responsiveness and efficiency.

AI-First Engineering & Agents

• Bring strong insight into AI trends, AI-assisted engineering, intelligent automation, and agent-based capabilities.
• Drive adoption of AI tools and practices to improve software design, development, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and operational workflows.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI and agents within the engineering lifecycle and product ecosystem to improve productivity, quality, and customer value.
• Guide teams on responsible AI usage, including security, privacy, governance, explainability, and reliability considerations.
• Evaluate AI-enabled platforms, developer tools, observability assistants, coding agents, and automation frameworks that can improve engineering outcomes at scale.

Database & Data Architecture

• Provide technical leadership in database design, data modeling, query optimization, transaction management, and scalable data access patterns.
• Work with relational and non-relational database technologies to support enterprise-grade application requirements.
• Guide teams in designing reliable, performant, and maintainable database solutions that support high-volume data processing and business-critical workflows.
• Lead troubleshooting of complex database performance issues, including indexing, locking, query plans, connection management, data partitioning, and schema evolution.
• Ensure data architecture decisions align with security, compliance, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability goals.

Security, Compliance & Enterprise Readiness

• Champion secure software design and development practices across the Ready product.
• Ensure systems are designed with strong consideration for authentication, authorization, data protection, encryption, auditability, and secure integration patterns.
• Promote enterprise readiness through resilient architecture, operational maturity, compliance awareness, and high-quality engineering standards.
• Partner with security, architecture, and platform teams to ensure technical solutions align with organizational governance and risk management expectations.

Technical Mentorship & Influence

• Mentor senior engineers, technical leads, and development teams on architecture, design, engineering practices, troubleshooting, and technical decision-making.
• Lead technical discussions with clarity, influence, and strong engineering judgment.
• Build consensus across teams on complex architecture and design decisions.
• Raise engineering standards through design reviews, technical coaching, documentation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 16+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building enterprise-scale software products.
• Strong proficiency in Java, including modern Java frameworks, backend service development, concurrency, performance tuning, and scalable application design.
• Deep experience with database technologies, including relational databases, SQL optimization, schema design, transaction management, indexing strategies, and performance troubleshooting.
• Proven experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and cloud-native enterprise applications.
• Strong understanding of observability platforms, monitoring, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, and production diagnostics.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with performance engineering, including profiling, load testing, capacity planning, caching, query optimization, and system tuning.
• Strong understanding of enterprise SaaS architecture, operational readiness, resiliency, availability, security, and scalability.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture discussions, define technical roadmaps, and influence engineering direction across multiple teams.
• Experience troubleshooting complex technical issues across application, infrastructure, database, and integration layers.
• Strong understanding of AI-assisted software engineering practices, AI tools, and emerging agent-based development or automation models.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, mentoring, and technical leadership skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on large-scale enterprise SaaS products serving global customers.
• Experience defining or evolving a product-level technology stack and long-term technical roadmap.
• Expertise with Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, messaging platforms, distributed caching, and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana, Splunk, Datadog, or similar platforms.
• Experience leading platform modernization, cloud transformation, or large-scale architecture evolution initiatives.
• Strong knowledge of secure software development, compliance-aware design, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Experience with AI coding assistants, engineering agents, intelligent automation, or AI-enabled operational tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical talent and establish engineering standards across teams.
• Ability to balance strategic architecture vision with hands-on technical problem solving and delivery execution.

Key Attributes

• Strategic technical thinker with strong execution discipline.
• Hands-on engineering leader who can guide architecture while also diving deep into technical issues.
• Strong enterprise mindset with focus on reliability, performance, observability, scalability, and security.
• Clear communicator who can lead technical discussions and influence decisions across teams.
• Passionate about engineering excellence, innovation, AI-first development, and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable working in complex environments with multiple stakeholders, systems, and priorities