Principal Site Reliability Engineer

About the Team

Principal Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at UKG are strategic technical leaders who play a critical role in shaping the reliability, scalability, and performance of our organization's services, at scale. They bring deep expertise across service delivery, infrastructure, and cloud architecture, and apply software engineering principles to solve complex operational challenges. Principal SREs drive technical vision and strategy across multiple teams and business units. In this role, you will define the operational reliability strategy, architect large-scale solutions, and establish the standards and practices that enable teams across UKG to build and operate highly reliable services. This includes guiding the evolution of CI/CD ecosystems, designing automated testing frameworks, building capacity planning and performance analysis systems, establishing observability standards, and creating reliability automation strategies as self-healing and remediation at scale. Principal SREs are passionate about driving business outcomes through technical excellence. They shape operational culture around reliability, mentor and develop SRE talent across teams, and relentlessly pursue the highest standards of customer experience through strategic automation and process innovation. This is a principal-level individual contributor and technical leadership role, focused on operational reliability strategy, cross-functional influence, and enterprise-scale impact.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the organization's Site Reliability Engineering strategy, vision, and technical roadmap in partnership with engineering leadership and business stakeholders.
• Guide the lifecycle of services from conception to end-of-life across the organization, including establishing service design review frameworks, capacity planning methodologies, and production readiness standards that scale across teams.
• Establish and drive adoption of organization-wide standards and best practices related to system architecture, service delivery, reliability, automation, and operational excellence.
• Influence technical decisions across multiple teams and business units.
• Build and operate shared platforms, tooling, and frameworks that enable service and engineering teams across the organization to achieve high availability and improve incident detection and response.
• Drive system performance, availability, and efficiency improvements across the organization through architectural guidance, automation strategy, process refinement, and deep analysis of operational patterns in incident reviews.
• Partner closely with engineering and product leadership across the organization to establish reliability standards, shape technical direction, and deliver reliable services at scale.