Principal Software Engineer/Architect

UKG; Lowell (MA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

UKG is seeking a senior software architecture leader in Lowell, MA to define and drive the architectural vision for UKG Ready. You will guide cross-functional teams, translate product requirements into scalable designs, and maintain a product-suite mindset.

You will own technical roadmaps, enforce CI/CD and observability practices, mentor engineers, and partner with product managers to deliver reliable, secure cloud-native solutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in engineering or computer science or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software development experience in a fast-paced environment.
• Proven experience as a lead architect driving complex SaaS and multi-tenant solutions.
• Strong design portfolio with Java-based development.
• Experience with observability tools (Datadog, Grafana) in production.
• Cloud technology proficiency (GCP, AWS, Azure) and Kubernetes for cloud-native design.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and architectural vision aligned with business goals.
• Define and maintain architectural governance, roadmaps, and design standards.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather requirements and ensure scalable, secure, cost-effective solutions.

Skills

Java

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Observability

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Multi-tenant SaaS

Datadog

Grafana

Kubernetes

SQL/NoSQL databases

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's/Master's in Engineering or Computer Science

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

Kubernetes

Boomi

Kafka

RabbitMQ

BigQuery

Snowflake

Tableau

Looker

Job description

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and support to UKG Ready engineering teams. Develop, design, and communicate a clear architectural vision and design for the teams that is aligned with the organization's goals and objectives, while keeping a product suite mindset at the forefront. Understand product requirements, drive for clarity of requirements to ensure the design is fit for purpose, and ensure design supports architecture strategy. Develop technical roadmaps and ensures that services for the suite meet established architectural guidelines and standards. Deep dive into the code to confirm design integrity and maintain a cost-effective straightforward design throughout the teams. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including developers, operations, and product managers, to gather requirements and ensure architectural design meets the needs of internal and external stakeholders. Collaborate with peers and technical leaders to define and articulate constraints and guidelines. Define and enforce CI/CD standards, development methodologies, and quality assurance processes. Identify and mitigate risks associated with architectural decisions. Anticipate business needs 6+ months out and works with leaders to inject effort. Use resources provided by Architecture Governance on common architecture practices (standards, templates, etc.) to ensure designs and vision reflect our principles and standards. Ensure effective adoption of observability tools for proactive alerting of production performance issues, adopt service-owner mindset to ensure quick recovery from problems, and constantly seek opportunities to improve resilience of services from failures. Leverage artificial intelligence tools to identify productivity improvements for engineering teams, as also value-add features for our users.
• Document and maintain the product & service architecture.
• Drive strategic architecture vision and innovation. Identify and evaluate emerging technologies, industry trends, and best practices to ensure the Value Streams scalability, security, and performance. Provide architecture leadership, focusing on creating and maintaining cross-product and multi-year architecture visions. Identify architecture risks, develop mitigation strategies, and maintain architectural opportunities for all stakeholders. Understand how architecture is done across the industry; research new technology trends; identify innovations that can drive a competitive advantage for UKG products.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's/Master's in engineering / Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software development experience in a fast-paced environment, working through all phases of the software development life cycle.
• Proven experience as a lead architect or similar role, driving the architecture and implementation of complex software solutions.
• Possess extensive design portfolios showing high proficiency in Java based development technologies for SaaS and Multi-Tenant systems.
• Experience leveraging observability tools such as Datadog and Grafana for production monitoring.
• Experience with modern cloud technology (GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, etc.) and the ability to design a solution that operates optimally in a cloud environment, including cost optimizations, leveraging managed services, observability, etc.
• Strong exposure for highly reliable, scalable, secure, and decoupled solution.
• Strong exposure to the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process (CI/CD).
• Experience in detailed analysis, feasibility studies, performance analysis and prototyping.
• Experience in developing software applications for multiplatform development.
• Experience in object-oriented programming and design, service oriented architecture and design patterns.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate with stakeholders at all levels of the organization.
• Excellent problem solving skills, with the ability to handle the most complex issues.
• Experience with relational and non-relational database technologies (SQL Server, PostGres, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc.).
• Experience with modern quality practices to effectively automate testing and eliminate manual test processes will be preferred.
• Experience with modern analytics technology (BigQuery, Snowflake, Tableau, Looker, etc.).
• Experience with messaging and event streaming solutions (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Apache Beam, Spark, etc.).
• Experience with industry leading integration platform (like Boomi).
• Act as a mentor to junior engineers and a resource for Sales/Services/Support and other cross functional teams.

Work Arrangement

• We work in a hybrid model. 3 days per week in the office is a requirement.