Principal Cloud Platform Engineer

Why UKG:

At UKG, your contributions genuinely matter. The code you create, the choices you make, and the care you provide to customers culminate in significant impacts. Every day, millions of employees engage with our workforce operating platform, benefiting from our services that help them get paid, advance their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That’s our mission.

We are committed to continuous learning, challenging the status quo, striving for improvement, and celebrating our achievements. Here, you’ll find real flexibility, dependable benefits, and a collaborative team spirit. Because at UKG, your work holds value—and so do you.

About the Role:

We are looking for a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer in our Enterprise Solutions and Experience (ESE) organization to spearhead the architecture and development of a cloud-native onboarding platform. This platform will empower engineering teams to effortlessly deploy and manage services across diverse cloud environments, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and AWS.

In this pivotal role, you will influence platform strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure engineering excellence within our distributed cloud systems. Your expertise will drive the design of scalable SaaS platform services built on microservices architecture, Kubernetes, and cutting-edge DevOps practices.

Key Responsibilities: • Architecture & Platform Strategy: Lead the design of a cloud onboarding platform that facilitates resource management across AWS, Azure, and GCP. • Define cloud-native architectural patterns utilizing microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and containerized workloads. • Establish design standards, reference architectures, and capabilities for scalable SaaS services. • Ensure systems are crafted for high availability, security, scalability, and resilience.

Platform Development: • Design and build robust backend services and APIs to support cloud onboarding workflows and automation. • Develop microservices in Kubernetes, employing modern programming languages such as Java, Go, or Python. • Create reusable platform components for self-service cloud onboarding for engineering teams. • Integrate platform services with essential cloud-native functionalities, including identity, networking, compute, and storage services.

Multi-Cloud Platform Engineering: • Engineer solutions supporting multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP). • Develop automation frameworks for infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management. • Implement Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or similar tools for secure and repeatable cloud provisioning. • Create abstraction layers and tooling for simplified multi-cloud governance and operations.

DevOps & Operational Excellence: • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment frameworks. • Implement monitoring, logging, and observability solutions to maintain system reliability and performance. • Champion site reliability engineering practices, including SLAs, SLOs, and incident response protocols. • Engage in production support, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis to enhance system stability.

Technical Leadership: • Act as a technical authority across engineering teams, shaping architecture and engineering methodologies. • Guide and mentor engineers on cloud-native development and microservices best practices. • Collaborate with product managers, architects, DevOps teams, and security personnel to enhance platform strategy. • Lead design evaluations and contribute to the long-term development of the platform.

Minimum Qualifications: • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. • 10+ years of experience in software development with a focus on scalable distributed systems. • Extensive experience in microservices architecture and cloud-native application development. • Strong exposure to public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). • Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes and containerized application development. • Proficient in backend development using Java, Go, Python, or similar languages. • Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar). • Competence in designing large-scale distributed SaaS platforms. • Solid understanding of cloud security, networking, and identity management. • Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps automation.

Preferred Qualifications: • Experience in building internal developer platforms or cloud onboarding systems. • Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SNS/SQS, Event Hub). • Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd. • Experience in implementing GitOps practices. • Familiarity with multi-cloud architectures in enterprise settings. • Experience in Agile/Scrum development environments.

Company Overview:

UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that transforms workforce understanding into action. With the most extensive collection of workforce insights and people-first AI, we empower our customers to solve challenges across all sectors—great organizations recognize that their workforce is their competitive advantage.

UKG is an equal opportunity employer, reviewing all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories.