Principal Software Engineer- Eng - JAVA + AI Architect

UKG; Dadri; On-site; INR 9,000,000 - 14,000,000; Full time

Job summary

UKG is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical direction for the Ready product within a modern, scalable enterprise SaaS environment. You will shape the architecture, drive the tech roadmap, and mentor teams across multiple disciplines, balancing strategy with hands‑on delivery.

The role requires deep experience in Java, distributed systems, cloud‑native engineering, observability and AI‑assisted development, with a focus on reliability and performance at scale.

Qualifications

• 16+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong Java proficiency and scalable backend design.
• Experience building enterprise‑scale SaaS and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive architectural vision for Ready product with scalability and security.
• Lead complex cross‑team engineering initiatives and design reviews.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards across teams.
• Improve observability, reliability, and performance across platforms.

Skills

Java expertise

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Cloud-native engineering

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Grafana

Prometheus

Kibana

Datadog

Job description

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly accomplished Principal Software Engineer to join the engineering team for the Ready product. This role is focused on leading the technical direction, architecture, and engineering strategy for a modern, scalable, resilient, and intelligent enterprise SaaS product.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will play a key role in defining the technology stack, shaping the technical roadmap, driving architectural decisions, and leading complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams. You will be expected to bring deep technical expertise, enterprise‑scale thinking, and a strong understanding of performance, reliability, observability, and operational excellence.

This role requires a hands‑on technical leader who can guide engineering teams through complex design decisions, lead technical discussions, troubleshoot critical technical issues, and influence the long‑term evolution of the Ready product. The ideal candidate will have strong proficiency in Java, database technologies, cloud‑native engineering, distributed systems, and modern AI‑assisted software engineering practices.

We are looking for an engineer who combines strategic technical vision with practical execution, mentors senior engineers, raises engineering standards, and helps build a product platform that is scalable, secure, observable, performant, and ready for the future.

Responsibilities

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 optimisation 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 optimisation, 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 modelling, query optimisation, 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, authorisation, 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 organisational 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 judgement.
• 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 optimisation, 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 optimisation 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 modernisation, 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.

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 [e-mail]