Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

UKG's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice is a small, elite team that embeds directly with our most strategic customers to solve high-value problems that sit just beyond the current product boundary. We deploy in small pods, move fast, learn the customer's world, and build things that work in production.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customer stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, data, systems, constraints, and opportunities for innovation.
• Translate ambiguous customer needs into hypotheses, prototypes, technical designs, implementation plans, and operational runbooks.
• Explore unfamiliar technologies, customer domains, and AI capabilities with curiosity, speed, and sound engineering judgment.
• Identify when a field-built solution should become a reusable platform capability or reference pattern.
• Design and build production-grade APIs, integrations, workflow automations, data pipelines, internal tools, and customer-facing technical solutions.
• Integrate UKG with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, data, and related systems using secure, auditable designs.
• Own technical delivery through discovery, design, build, testing, go-live, and early operational handoff.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across speed, quality, scalability, security, maintainability, and customer impact.
• Set technical direction for an FDE engagement or major solution area and keep engineering work focused on the customer outcome.
• Guide other FDEs through architecture reviews, pairing, code reviews, technical planning, and high-judgment customer moments.
• Collaborate closely with the engagement PM, customer teams, Product, Engineering, Support, and Security to surface risks, dependencies, and decisions early.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Navigate difficult delivery moments with creativity, perseverance, and a bias toward making progress.
• Contribute reusable components, templates, examples, reference architectures, demos, and implementation notes that accelerate future engagements.
• Provide clear feedback to Product and Engineering on platform gaps, repeatable customer needs, and opportunities to productize field-built solutions.
• Help develop the FDE playbook: better discovery methods, solution patterns, demo assets, tooling, and engineering practices.
• Identify expansion signals and help define the next high-value problems the team should solve for the customer.
• Identify practical, high-impact uses of AI within existing enterprise workflows.
• Prototype and deploy AI-assisted patterns such as intelligent intake, summarization, recommendations, routing, data extraction, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Design for security, privacy, compliance, explainability, evaluation, monitoring, and operational control from the start.
• Apply sound judgment around model limitations, sensitive data, access controls, failure modes, and responsible use of AI.
• Turn successful AI patterns into reusable implementation guidance for the broader FDE library.

Qualifications

• Typically 7+ years of experience building software, developer platforms, cloud applications, AI-enabled products, technical solutions, or production integrations.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across APIs, cloud services, data flows, testing, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and operational support.
• Experience designing and deploying production systems or customer-facing technical solutions in ambiguous environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction for a workstream, engagement, or complex solution area.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain tradeoffs clearly to technical teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar domains quickly and turning incomplete information into practical technical plans.
• Familiarity with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-enabled tools, LLMs, copilots, workflow automation, or agentic patterns.
• Sound judgment around security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and responsible use of AI.

Skills

• Curiosity: Enjoy learning new technologies, customer domains, workflows, and AI capabilities.
• Creativity: Look for novel, elegant ways to solve problems when there is no established playbook.
• Perseverance: Stay resilient through ambiguity, iteration, technical blockers, and changing customer needs.
• Technical judgment: Know when to prototype quickly, when to harden a system, and when to simplify the design.
• Builder's mindset: Prefer making things real - prototypes, code, demos, tools, and production systems.
• Customer empathy: Listen carefully, ask strong questions, and connect technical choices to business outcomes.
• Systems thinking: Understand how people, process, data, and technology interact in real-world environments.
• Leadership: Raise the quality of the team through clarity, mentorship, practical standards, and calm execution.

Benefits

At UKG, your work matters—and so do you. We offer flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together.

Pay

The pay range for this position is $129,500 to $214,015. 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.

Schedule

Details on the schedule will be provided during the interview process.