Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect

The job

LIVE Live feed (private-sector employer) Source: The Muse public API · Data: listed 2026-09-23

Job description

Why UKG:

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. We never stop challenging the norm. We push for better, and we celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you'll get flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters-and so do you.

UKG builds award-winning HR and workforce management software used worldwide. Ready is a $500M line of business serving ~55,000 SMB customers today and is expected to grow to ~$1.2B in revenue within four years. This growth trajectory makes Ready a strategic product family for UKG - and it creates a unique, high-impact place for an architectural leader to shape scale, M&A integration, and the AI/ML-enabled product roadmap.

About the role:
We are hiring a Senior Principal Software Engineer to lead UKG Ready SMB - Architecture & Design, with a heavy emphasis on integrating AI responsibly at product scale and driving M&A technical outcomes. This is a strategic, hands-on individual contributor role: you will define the architecture for Ready's SMB product family, ensure the product can scale to the organization's growth targets, lead technical due diligence and integration for acquisitions, and drive cross-functional alignment on AI/ML adoption and platform readiness. While AI/LLM capabilities will be a major component of the roadmap, the role focuses on architecture, operationalization, governance, and product integration rather than primarily building in-house model training frameworks.

What you'll own:
Architecture & scaling for high growth: Define, communicate and own the Ready SMB architecture to support 55K+ customers today and a product footprint that must scale to the company's $1.2B revenue target - including tenancy models, service boundaries, performance/cost tradeoffs, extensibility and safe upgrade paths.

Architectural Governance: Develop and maintain architectural standards and governance frameworks tailored to HCM requirements, including compliance, data privacy, and security.

AI integration & operationalization: Design production-grade patterns for embedding generative AI and ML features into Ready: model serving patterns, inference topology (edge vs. centralized), latency / throughput SLAs, MLOps pipelines, evaluation & rollout strategies, and monitoring/rollback controls.

M&A technical leadership: Lead technical diligence for acquisitions affecting Ready: evaluate architecture fit, identify integration risks (data, security, compliance), design migration/integration plans, and lead or advise post-close execution to minimize customer and delivery risk.

Cross-functional product enablement: Translate product and customer needs (sales/professional services/CS constraints) into architecture decisions that enable configurability, localization, performance tiers, and integrations with customer systems.

Platform & operational standards: Set platform standards for cloud, CI/CD, container orchestration (Kubernetes), observability, capacity planning and SRE practices that deliver predictable ops at scale and control operating cost as the product grows.

Responsible AI & governance: Establish guardrails for data privacy, model governance, explainability, bias mitigation and auditability appropriate to Ready's customer base and regulatory footprint.

Hands-on technical leadership: Own high-risk or high-impact technical work (POCs, performance optimizations, complex integrations), mentor architects and senior engineers, and lead architecture reviews and decision records.

Documentation & repeatability: Produce high-fidelity architecture artifacts: decision records, integration playbooks, runbooks, API and data contracts, and M&A intake/checklists.

Customer Success: Be extremely customer-oriented, have empathy for the users and have accountability & ownership of the Ready solution.

Communication: Leading upstream and downstream influence and communication as well as advising teams on executive leadership.

Key deliverables / success signals:

• A published Ready SMB architecture roadmap and architecture decision records adopted by product and engineering teams.
• Production-ready AI integration patterns and MLOps requirements implemented by Ready product teams.
• Repeatable, low-risk M&A intake, diligence and integration playbooks that shorten integration time and lower technical risk.
• Demonstrable improvements in time-to-market for cross-team integrations, operational reliability and cost-efficiency as Ready scales to its revenue target.
• Clear evidence of sustained cross-functional alignment (Product, SRE, Security, Sales, Professional Services, and Customer Success).
• Clear ability to mentor to the engineers in the organization. Success and growth of the team being the key metric.

• Seasoned architectural leader: ~12+ years engineering experience, with substantial time leading architecture for large SaaS products and proven individual technical leadership at scale (or equivalent).
• SaaS & multi-tenant expertise: Hands-on experience designing and operating multi-tenant, API-first SaaS systems supporting large numbers of customers and multiple operational tiers.
• AI in production: Demonstrated experience integrating AI/ML (including LLM/generative features) into production products - defining serving topologies, MLOps, monitoring and governance.
• M&A technical experience: Direct involvement in technical due diligence and post-close technical integration for acquisitions, including data migration, security and compliance assessments.
• Cloud & platform expertise: Deep knowledge of public cloud architectures (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration, API design, eventing/streaming and data platform patterns (ETL/ELT, feature stores, data contracts).
• Operational rigor & security: Strong background in SRE practices, observability (metrics/logs/traces), capacity planning and secure architecture for customer data.
• Communicator & influencer: Proven ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders; exceptional documentation and architecture decision skills.
• Education/credentials: Advanced degree (MS/PhD) preferred but not required if experience demonstrates equivalent technical stature.

• Prior Senior Principal Engineer/Architect experience (or equivalent senior technical role).
• Track record of public speaking, patents, or publications in scalable systems or AI in production.
• Experience with cost-efficient inference strategies, responsible AI tooling (bias testing, explainability), and model lifecycle management.
• Experience with SMB/mid-market customer operations and the commercial constraints that shape product design.
• Experience in regulated industries or privacy-sensitive product engineering.

• A strategic, hands-on IC: you will both set direction and deliver/ship technically complex, risky work.
• Expect heavy cross-functional collaboration: Product, Data Science, Security, SRE, Professional Services and Sales will be regular partners.
• Significant time will be spent on executive-level planning, high-stakes M&A technical reviews, and technical onboarding of acquired assets.
• Expected to be a strong mentor for Principal and Sr Staff Engineers within the organization.
• Be highly accountable for how the software runs in Production and takes ownership of ensuring customer success.

Explore around this job

Field: Technology Sub-niche: Software engineering All jobs at UKG Jobs in Georgia Jobs in Alpharetta, GA Alpharetta city guide Georgia state guide Fulton County economy

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About the role

This is a Senior Level role in the Technology field (Software engineering) at UKG. Senior roles usually expect substantial experience, ownership of results and often the ability to guide others.

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How to prepare and behave

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The city

The job is in Alpharetta, GA. Below is what the official statistics say about living and working there.

How Alpharetta compares. Among the 100 largest places in Georgia, Alpharetta is #14 by population, #3 for household income (#1 = highest), #4 for remote work (#1 = most), #95 for rent (#1 = cheapest). Its county, Fulton County, is #1 of 159 counties for average pay ($100,817).

The place in numbers

Alpharetta has 66,855 residents (ACS 2020–2024), about 0.6% of the population of Georgia. It covers 27 square miles of land, which works out to roughly 2,485 people per square mile. The median age is 41.3, 10% older than the state median (41.3 against 37.6).

Housing

The median gross rent is $1,948 a month (rent plus utilities), 40% above the state median ($1,948 against $1,393). Over a year that is 15.8% of the median household income. US housing guidance treats housing as affordable when it takes 30% of income or less, so the typical household is under that line. The median home value is $649,000, which is 4.4 times the median household income ($147,612). 65.1% of households own their home, about the same as the state average (65.1% against 65.7%).

Work and pay

The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA metropolitan area has 2,889,670 jobs in the BLS wage survey, and the median pay across all occupations is $51,170 a year, about the same as the national median ($51,170 against $50,980). The biggest occupation groups are office and administrative support (328,500 jobs, median $47,040); transportation and material moving (313,910 jobs, median $44,120); sales and related (277,630 jobs, median $37,550). The area is most specialised in business and financial operations (1.3 times) and legal (1.3 times), where the share of workers is above the national share. The best-paying groups with at least 5,000 jobs are management ($130,550) and computer and mathematical ($110,010). In 2026M09 the unemployment rate of Fulton County was 3.6%. 71.1% of residents aged 16 and over are in the labour force. The city lies in Fulton County; its jobs, pay by industry and GDP are on the county page.

Getting around

Among workers, 54.5% drive alone, 0.5% use public transit, 1.8% walk, 36.7% work from home. 18.7% of workers commute 45 minutes or more, 6% below the state average (18.7% against 19.8%). Remote work is more common than in the state as a whole, which widens the set of employers a resident can work for without moving.

People and education

70.7% of adults aged 25 and over hold a bachelor's degree or higher, 102% above the state share (70.7% against 35.0%). 27.8% of residents were born outside the United States, 149% above the state share (27.8% against 11.2%). The poverty rate is 5.6%, 58% below the state rate (5.6% against 13.4%).

Climate

The warmest month is Jul, averaging 80°F (26.5°C), and the coolest is Jan at 40°F (4.7°C). About 1,292 mm (51 inches) of precipitation falls in a year; Dec is the wettest month (133 mm) and Oct the driest (88 mm). These values come from NASA satellite-based climatology on a grid of about 50 km, so they describe the wider area, not a weather station in the city.

Nearby cities to compare

Closest cities in this guide: Johns Creek (5 miles, rent 16% higher); Roswell (5 miles, rent 7% lower); Milton (6 miles, rent 6% higher); Peachtree Corners (8 miles, rent 13% lower). Rent differences are against Alpharetta; use the Compare tab to put any two cities side by side.

Full guide to Alpharetta →Georgia guideAll jobs in Alpharetta

Official links for Alpharetta

• Census Bureau data profile for Alpharetta
• Official state website: georgia.gov
• BLS Economy at a Glance: Georgia

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Where to live

CITY Official statistics Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024 5-year (via Census Reporter) · Data: ACS 2020–2024

Places within 50 miles (straight line) of Alpharetta, GA that have a guide, with what living there costs. No pay estimate is shown because the title did not match one occupation.

Career paths

We could not match this title to one occupation, so here are the other sub-niches in Technology, where your skills may carry over:

Cybersecurity (366) Data, analytics and AI (1991) Cloud, IT and infrastructure (504) Product management (412)

Distances

CITY Calculation (straight line) Source: U.S. Census Bureau Gazetteer (coordinates) · Data: 2024

How far Alpharetta, GA is from the 20 largest US cities, in straight-line miles (not driving distance). Click a column to sort.

Nearby cities with open jobs (within 120 miles)

The employer

UKG is the employer in this listing. See all its open jobs here →

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What it is like to work at a company (culture, schedules, benefits) is not in the source data, so we do not describe it. Read the description and ask the questions under "How to prepare".

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Similar jobs

Same sub-niche: Software engineering

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FAQ

What is the Senior Principal Software Engineer/Architect job at UKG?

A senior level role in technology (software engineering) listed 47 days ago. The full description is on this page and on The Muse.

Where is this job?

Alpharetta, GA.

How do I apply?

Use the "View this job and apply on The Muse" button. AtiveSite does not receive applications.

How much does it pay?

The listing does not publish pay, and we could not match the title to one official occupation.

What is the cost of living there?

Median rent in Alpharetta is $1,948 a month and median household income $147,612 (ACS 2020–2024).

How old is this listing?

It was posted on 2026-09-23 (47 days ago). Jobs older than 90 days are not shown.

Are there similar jobs?

Yes: browse software engineering jobs in Georgia.

Sources and terms

• Job data: The Muse public API (listing dated 2026-09-23). The job disappears from this site when it disappears from the source.
• Wages and projections: BLS OEWS (May 2025) and Employment Projections 2025–35.
• City and county figures: Census Bureau ACS 2020–2024, BEA, BLS QCEW and LAUS, NASA POWER climatology; distances from Census Gazetteer coordinates.

AtiveSite is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Muse, the employer or any government agency, and does not process applications. Verify every detail with the employer before acting.

Sources

• BLS OEWS (wages and employment by occupation, May 2025)
• BLS Employment Projections 2025–35
• BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics
• BLS JOLTS
• BLS State and Metro Area Employment
• Census Bureau American Community Survey (via Census Reporter)
• BEA GDP by state and Regional Price Parities
• IRS 2026 tax adjustments
• U.S. Department of Labor, minimum wage by state
• Tax Foundation state income tax rates 2026
• USAJOBS
• USCIS
• U.S. Department of State, visas
• NASA POWER climatology
• GeoNames / Census Gazetteer (coordinates)