Sr Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform. Helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That’s what we do. We never stop learning, challenging the norm, and pushing for better while celebrating the wins along the way. Here, you’ll get real flexibility, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together.

UKG is unable to offer sponsorship for this position.

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior Staff Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to lead complex enterprise engagements across UKG’s HCM, Payroll, and Workforce Management ecosystem. This role operates as a principal architect and strategic advisor, combining enterprise systems design, agentic AI architecture, and hands-on engineering. You will embed with strategic customers to deliver production-grade integrations, AI-enabled workflows, and reusable platform patterns that accelerate time-to-value and expansion. This is not traditional consulting — you will ship production systems and influence product and platform direction.

You will directly shape how enterprise customers adopt UKG’s platform and AI capabilities. This role drives customer outcomes, platform leverage, and product evolution — forming a critical link between enterprise reality and engineering strategy.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture for complex enterprise ecosystems across HCM, Payroll, WFM, ERP, IAM, and adjacent systems
• Design and deliver production-grade integrations, automation, and AI-enabled workflows
• Advise customers on agentic AI adoption, including orchestration, decisioning, and human-in-the-loop systems
• Translate business problems into scalable architectures combining systems + AI capabilities
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to CIO/CTO-level stakeholders
• Drive reusable accelerators, templates, and reference architectures
• Mentor and guide other FDEs; set technical standards and best practices
• Influence product roadmap through structured field feedback

Agentic AI Leadership

• Guide enterprise customers on safe, compliant, and scalable AI adoption
• Design and prototype agentic workflows integrated with enterprise systems
• Identify high-value use cases for AI-driven automation and orchestration
• Balance AI innovation with enterprise constraints (security, governance, auditability)
• Contribute reusable AI patterns and reference implementations to the platform

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering, architecture, or distributed systems
• Deep experience with enterprise integrations (APIs, event-driven systems, data pipelines, IAM)
• Strong cloud architecture experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Experience building production-grade systems in enterprise environments
• Strong customer-facing and executive communication skills
• Ability to operate autonomously and lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives

AI / Systems Expertise

• Experience with AI-enabled systems, LLMs, copilots, or automation frameworks
• Familiarity with agentic AI concepts (agents, orchestration, tool use)
• Understanding of enterprise AI constraints (security, privacy, compliance)
• Ability to translate AI strategy into production-ready architectures
• Strong systems thinking across human + AI + system interactions

Success Metrics

• Reduction in enterprise Time-to-Value
• Successful, scalable production deployments
• Reusable assets and AI patterns adopted across customers
• Expansion ARR influenced
• Executive-level customer satisfaction

Company Overview

UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work. With the world's largest collection of workforce insights and people-first AI, our ability to reveal unseen ways to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent is unmatched. It’s this expertise that equips our customers with the intelligence to solve any challenge in any industry — because great organizations know their workforce is their competitive edge.

Pay

The pay range for this position is $145,600 to $240,695. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge, and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation.

Benefits

Learn more about UKG’s benefits and rewards at ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits.