Sr. Staff Data Scientist- Eng

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.

About the Role:

At UKG, we are at the forefront of innovation leading the next wave of disruption in the Human Capital Management industry. With our unparalleled dataset - the most complete view into our customers' workforce - we are uniquely positioned to build AI-powered solutions that fundamentally change how businesses manage their people. Our Data Science team sits at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world impact, building models and intelligent systems at scale that serve millions of employees and managers every day.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Data Scientist (P5) who will set the multi-year, multi-team technical strategy and deliver it through direct implementation and broad technical leadership. Operating at portfolio scope, you will influence roadmaps across multiple teams, drive step-change improvements in our Data Science capabilities, and serve as a recognized authority whose decisions shape how data science is practiced across the organization.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Technical strategy & vision: Define and own the long-term Data Science technical strategy - the multi-year roadmap for platform capabilities, tooling investments, and methodology evolution. Anticipate challenges and opportunities over multi-year horizon and build stakeholder alignment for strategic initiatives. Align Data Science capabilities with broader business strategy.
• Architecture & systems design: Design coherent, multi-team architecture that enable DATA SCIENCE work across the organization. Create architectural patterns adopted broadly, anticipating scale and evolution needs to minimize rework as the organization grows. Review and guide critical architecture decisions across the portfolio.
• Results & end-to-end ownership: Identify portfolio wide improvement opportunities. Execute large-scale projects spanning multiple teams and value streams with year-long horizons. Drive step-change improvements in DS capabilities. Own decisions with area-wide impact and create scalable solutions that reduce toil across the organization.
• Decision-making & judgment: Make org-level decisions balancing multiple competing interests. Avoid locally optimal decisions that create downstream costs. Create frameworks that enable others to make consistently good decisions. Evaluate major technology investments - build vs. buy, vendor selection, and platform commitments.
• AI & ML craft leadership: Define org-wide standards for AI and ML development - selecting frameworks and architectural patterns teams should follow. Evaluate emerging AI/ML frameworks across the industry and drive adoption of high-value tools. Create evaluation frameworks and best practices for agentic systems. Champion experimentation with novel AI architectures.
• Business acumen & stakeholder influence: Develop a deep understanding of UKG's business model and competitive strategy. Translate business needs into DS investments, identifying which ML capabilities would most accelerate business goals. Influence business decisions with DS insights at the executive level. Influence roadmaps across multiple teams for measurable business impact.
• Mentorship & talent development: Mentor senior ICs; spread knowledge across teams. Be active in senior hiring and build the DS talent pipeline. Shape org-wide learning and development strategy. Model continuous learning by seeking feedback from diverse sources including senior leaders and peers at peer companies.
• Innovation & agility: Remain resilient through significant organizational change and help the organization navigate uncertainty. Push boundaries with breakthrough approaches. Connect emerging technologies to business opportunities and create space for innovation across teams.

• PhD in a quantitative field plus 5+ years of industry experience, or Master's degree plus 10+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or a closely related discipline.
• Expert-level fluency in multiple DS specialty areas - generative AI, agentic AI systems, LLMs and foundation models, deep learning, time-series forecasting, regression, classification, or NLP.
• Demonstrated ability to own and drive multi-year technical strategy spanning multiple teams and product areas, with measurable impact across value streams.
• Proven ability to influence roadmaps, platform decisions, and cross-functional teams - including product, engineering, and senior leadership - without direct managerial authority.
• Advanced programming skills in Python; fluency in ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), data tools (Pandas, NumPy, SQL), and cloud platforms such as GCP / Agent Platform and BigQuery, or equivalent.
• Experience ensuring data quality and governance at organizational scale; influencing data strategy across multiple teams.
• Exceptional ability to communicate architectural tradeoffs, multi-year strategy, and quantitative results to both technical peers and executive stakeholders.
• Experience with model fine-tuning (SLMs, RLHF, distillation), multi-modal architectures, or advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.

• Advanced knowledge of GCP technologies: Agent Platform, BigQuery, GKE, Dataflow, or equivalent infrastructure for large-scale ML workloads.
• Hands-on experience designing and productionizing multi-agent systems using agentic frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, Model Context Protocol) and defining best practices for their org-wide adoption.
• Experience across multiple HCM product domains (e.g., Workforce Management, Talent & Recruiting, Pay & Compensation, People ) with insight into how DS drives value differently across each.
• Experience setting org-wide coding standards and creating foundational libraries and frameworks.
• Familiarity with responsible AI principles: fairness, interpretability, privacy-preserving ML, and model risk management at scale.