Software Engineer III - GitOps and Kubernetes

About the role

UKG is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain our public/private cloud’s PaaS layer (Platform as a Service).

This is a specialized team that abstracts the complexities of Infrastructure, Networking, and Security requirements to ensure they are consumed in standardized ways for supporting Applications.

These services are built in Linux leveraging various technologies including Go, Ansible, K8s, GKE, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Openstack, to name a few.

This position will partner with our Agile development teams to assure smooth integration and deployment of UKG software across the entire cloud infrastructure.

This work is in the Engineering Acceleration group supporting internal product teams in their deployments.

The right software engineer background and experience will be with cloud technologies, GitHub Actions, Terraform and Ansible.

Responsibilities

• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code for various software applications and systems.
• Drive the technical strategy and vision for major projects and initiatives, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices.
• Communicate complex concepts, anticipate potential objections, and influence others to adopt a point of view.
• Lead cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deliver high-impact software projects on time and within budget.
• Cookordination activities and tasks of other team members, working independently and needing guidance only in the most complex situations.
• Architect, design, and develop complex software systems and applications, ensuring high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Collaborate with architects on mid-level and high-level design.
• Solve complex issues with innovative solutions, setting precedents as needed.
• Navigate information, alternatives, and relationships to achieve results.
• Impact the achievement of area/group objectives.
• Develop team policies, procedures, and techniques.
• Drive prioritization of technical debt, articulating the expected impact and outcomes.
• Ensure the health and quality of services and incidents, proactively identifying and addressing issues.
• Utilize service health indicators and telemetry for action.
• Conduct thorough root cause analysis and implement measures to prevent future recurrences.
• Advocate for and implement best quality practices, hold a high bar for engineering excellence, and guide the team in maintaining service quality through the testing pyramid.
• Oversee CI/CD pipelines, ensuring efficient build, test, and deployment phases.
• Take ownership from working with product management on requirements to designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software in production.
• Build testable software, define tests, participate in the testing process, automate tests using tools (e.g., JUnit, Selenium) and design patterns leveraging the test automation pyramid as the guide.
• Conduct comprehensive code reviews, providing constructive feedback and ensuring adherence to best practices.
• Mentor junior engineers on taking ownership of the full lifecycle of services and features.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive technical documentation for software applications and systems.
• Stay current with emerging technologies and industry trends, advocating for their adoption where appropriate to drive innovation and productivity enhancement within the team (e.g., CoPilot).

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• 1.5 years of GitOps/DevOps experience building Infrastructure as Code pipelines or processes to support large teams.
• Deep expertise in one or more programming languages such as GoLang, C, C++, C#, .NET, Python, Java, or JavaScript.
• Extensive experience with GitOps tooling for example GitHub Actions, leveraging Terraform and Ansible to create CI/CD pipeline automation frameworks and container-based deployments.
• Deep experience working with Kubernetes, Docker, and public cloud deployment platforms.
• Extensive experience with software architecture and design patterns, including the ability to design and implement scalable, reliable systems in a DevOps model.
• Proven track record of leading and delivering large-scale, complex software projects.
• Proficiency with cloud technologies like Azure, AWS, GCP, and version control systems like GitHub.
• Proficiency in building telemetry or observability as part of the development process.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes operators, networking primitives, including Services, Ingress, Gateway API, and service mesh architectures (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), with hands-on experience operating them at scale.
• Strong expertise in DNS architecture and operations, including traffic management, split-horizon DNS, failover strategies, and performance optimization in large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with API gateway and edge routing technologies (e.g., NGINX, Envoy, Kong, or cloud-native equivalents), including authentication, rate limiting, and policy enforcement.
• Hands-on experience with TLS/mTLS, certificate lifecycle management, and secure service-to-service communication in a Kubernetes or microservices environment.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Familiarity with developing accessible technologies.
• Dedicated to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
• Recognized as an expert in their technical area.
• Understanding of internal and external business challenges and regulatory factors.