Staff Software Engineer (Agentic AI)

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy production-grade AI agents using Google ADK and other agentic platforms (Anthropic Claude SDK, LangGraph, etc.)
• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code for agent workflows, tool integrations, and multi-agent orchestration
• Build agents that integrate with enterprise systems through tools, APIs, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
• Design and implement custom tools, skills, and plugins that extend agent capabilities across UKG's HCM platform
• Drive the technical strategy and vision for agentic AI initiatives and major projects, ensuring alignment with business goals and industry best practices
• Communicate complex agent architectures to non-technical stakeholders, anticipate potential objections, and influence others to adopt a point of view
• Lead cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deliver high-impact agent-powered projects on time and within budget
• Oversee agent deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Ensure the health and quality of agent-powered services, proactively identifying and addressing issues
• Implement best practices for agent versioning, cost monitoring, performance optimization, and iterative improvement
• Build observability into agent workflows including execution tracing, decision logging, and failure analysis
• Advocate for and implement best quality practices for agentic systems, hold a high bar for engineering excellence, and guide the team in maintaining service quality through comprehensive testing (including agent evaluation, prompt testing, tool validation)
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance on agent development, fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• Explore new agent capabilities, tool integrations, and orchestration patterns

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• 7+ years of professional software development experience, with 2+ years building agentic AI systems or LLM-powered applications in production
• Deep expertise in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, JavaScript, or TypeScript
• Hands-on experience building production agents using platforms such as Google ADK, Anthropic Claude SDK, LangChain, LangGraph, or similar agentic frameworks
• Experience designing and implementing multi-agent systems, agent orchestration patterns, and tool-use architectures
• Strong understanding of prompt engineering, context engineering, and agent design patterns (ReAct, Chain-of-Thought, tool use, multi-agent collaboration)
• Experience integrating agents with enterprise systems through APIs, tools, and protocols (REST APIs, MCP, function calling)
• Extensive experience with software architecture and design patterns, including the ability to design and implement scalable, reliable agentic systems in a DevOps model
• Proven track record of leading and delivering large-scale, complex software projects including agentic AI initiatives
• Proficiency with cloud technologies like GCP (Vertex AI, Google ADK), Azure (Azure OpenAI), AWS (Bedrock), and version control systems like GitHub
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail, with a commitment to delivering high-quality agent-powered solutions
• Proficiency in building telemetry and observability for agentic systems (execution tracing, decision logging, cost monitoring, success rate tracking)
• Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and drive agentic AI technical decisions across the organization and translate agent capabilities to non-technical stakeholders

Benefits

At UKG, your work matters—and so do you. 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. Learn more about UKG’s benefits and rewards at https://www.ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits.