Principal Software Engineer, Data Platform

Company Overview

With 80,000 customers across 150 countries, UKG is the largest U.S.-based private software company in the world. And we're only getting started. Ready to bring your bold ideas and collaborative mindset to an organization that still has so much more to build and achieve? Read on.

At UKG, you get more than just a job. You get to work with purpose. Our team of U Krewers are on a mission to inspire every organization to become a great place to work through our award-winning HR technology built for all.

Here, we know that you're more than your work. That's why our benefits help you thrive personally and professionally, from wellness programs and tuition reimbursement to U Choose - a customizable expense reimbursement program that can be used for more than 200+ needs that best suit you and your family, from student loan repayment, to childcare, to pet insurance. Our inclusive culture, active and engaged employee resource groups, and caring leaders value every voice and support you in doing the best work of your career. If you're passionate about our purpose - people -then we can't wait to support whatever gives you purpose. We're united by purpose, inspired by you.

• Architect and evolve a cloud-native data platform using BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataform, Pub/Sub, Dataproc, Cloud Storage.
• Build scalable data ingestion, transformation, and aggregation pipelines that support high-volume HCM datasets.
• Collaborate with the Data Science team to operationalize their models, quantitative logic, and statistical frameworks-without owning statistical methodology design.
• Implement end-to-end data workflows that generate aggregated insights and derived metrics at scale.
• Engineer strong privacy, compliance, and anonymization mechanisms into all data pipelines (masking, thresholding, auditing).
• Translate analytical requirements into technical designs and execution plans in partnership with product and data stakeholders.
• Lead architecture reviews, performance tuning, cost optimization, and reliability engineering initiatives.
• Mentor engineers; guide design reviews, coding standards, and technical best practices.
• Troubleshoot complex issues involving distributed processing, data-quality anomalies, or system bottlenecks.
• Introduce new GCP tools or frameworks as needed to support long-term scalability and maintainability.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in senior or staff-level positions.
• Deep experience building distributed data systems using GCP services, including BigQuery, Dataflow (Beam), Dataform, and Pub/Sub.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Scala, or similar languages used in data engineering.
• Strong understanding of data modeling, partitioning strategies, schema evolution, and cost-efficient query optimization.
• Experience designing security-first data pipelines with privacy-preserving transformations.
• Ability to break ambiguous problems into structured designs and actionable plans.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction across teams.
• Strong experience integrating data-science workflows or ML/analytical models into production systems.

• Experience with HCM, payroll, or other HR/enterprise data domains.
• Background supporting analytics-driven products, metrics systems, or derived-indicator pipelines.
• Experience using Dataform for SQL transformation management and production model organization.
• Familiarity with statistical concepts or time-series patterns (not for model creation, but for effective collaboration with Data Science).
• Experience with data lineage, data-quality scoring, observability systems, and automated validation frameworks.
• Experience with Cloud Composer, Dataproc, or streaming architectures for near-real-time data processing.
• Track record shaping long-term architecture or leading cross-organizational platform initiatives