Sr Principal Machine Learning Engineer

You will collaborate with senior technologists, product leaders, and researchers across the company and around the globe to solve complex, high-impact problems using machine learning, large language models, and agent-based AI systems.

About the Role:
As a Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer at UKG, you will provide technical leadership in the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI/ML systems. You will work across classical machine learning, LLM-based solutions, and Agent AI frameworks, shaping the architectural direction of intelligent platforms used at massive scale.
This role blends deep hands-on technical expertise with strategic influence. You will mentor senior engineers, guide architectural decisions, and partner closely with product and business stakeholders to translate real-world problems into robust, ethical, and scalable AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities:
• Lead the architectural design and implementation of end-to-end machine learning systems, from data ingestion and feature engineering to model deployment and monitoring.
• Design, build, and optimize classical ML models (e.g., regression, tree-based models, clustering, time-series, optimization) for large-scale, real-world business problems.
• Lead development and production rollout of LLM-based solutions, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation frameworks.
• Architect and implement Agentic AI systems, leveraging modern agent frameworks to orchestrate tools, workflows, reasoning, and memory.
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering leadership to define AI strategy aligned with business outcomes and customer needs.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to ML engineers and data scientists, establishing best practices for model development, testing, and deployment.
• Drive standards for model governance, explainability, bias mitigation, security, and compliance across AI solutions.
• Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to design scalable, cloud-native ML/AI platforms.
• Conduct deep technical reviews, influence design decisions, and champion engineering excellence.
• Stay current with emerging research, tools, and industry trends in AI/ML, LLMs, and autonomous systems, applying them pragmatically to UKG products.

About You:
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant depth in machine learning and applied AI.
• Strong foundation in classical machine learning techniques, statistics, and optimization, with proven success in production environments.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications, including fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, and evaluation strategies.
• Proven experience designing and implementing Agent AI frameworks and multi-agent systems for complex workflows.
• Expertise with ML frameworks and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and modern data ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of ML system design, MLOps, CI/CD for models, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Experience deploying AI systems in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Demonstrated ability to influence architecture and technical direction across large, cross-functional teams.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into scalable AI solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to executive and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience applying AI/ML within HCM, workforce management, or enterprise SaaS domains.
• Familiarity with responsible AI practices, governance frameworks, and regulatory considerations.
• Experience working in Agile development environments at scale.
• Contributions to open-source ML/AI projects, research publications, or industry forums.

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. Learn more at ukg.com.

UKG is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace, including the recruitment process.

Disability Accommodation in the Application and Interview Process

For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email UKGCareers@ukg.com

Client-provided location(s): Bangalore, India

Job ID: ukg-SRPRI017373

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2026-03-27T19:00:30