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.

• Built in Linux leveraging various technologies including Go, Ansible, K8s, GKE, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Openstack, to name a few.
• Partner with our Agile development teams to assure smooth integration and deployment of UKG software across the entire cloud infrastructure.
• This position will partner with our Engineering Acceleration group supporting internal product teams in their deployments.

Responsibilities

Software Development: Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code for various software applications and systems.

Technical Strategy: Drive the technical strategy and vision for major projects and initiatives, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices.

Be able to communicate complex concepts, anticipate potential objections, and influence others to adopt a point of view.

Leadership: Lead cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deliver high-impact software projects on time and within budget.

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.

Communicate complex concepts, anticipate objections, and influence adoption of viewpoints.

Impact: Impact the achievement of area/group objectives.

Develop team policies, procedures, and techniques.

Drive prioritization of technical debt, articulating the expected impact and outcomes.

Service Health and Quality: 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.

Engineering Excellence Practices: 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.

DevOps Model: 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.

Testing: 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.

Code Review: Conduct comprehensive code reviews, providing constructive feedback and ensuring adherence to best practices.

Mentorship: Provide technical mentorship and guidance, fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

Mentor junior engineers on taking ownership of the full lifecycle of services and features.

Documentation: Develop and maintain comprehensive technical documentation for software applications and systems.

Innovation: 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.
• Experience and deep understanding GitHub Actions, Argo CD, or similar GitOps and CI/CD platforms for Kubernetes application deployment, release orchestration, traffic routing, and lifecycle management.
• 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.