Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

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.

Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Team

UKG's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) practice is a small, elite team that embeds directly with our most strategic customers to solve high-value problems that sit just beyond the current product boundary. We deploy in small pods, move fast, learn the customer's world, and build things that work in production.

• Partner directly with customer stakeholders to understand workflows, pain points, data, systems, constraints, and opportunities for innovation.
• Ask sharp questions that reveal the real problem, not just the requested feature or implementation path.
• Translate ambiguous customer needs into hypotheses, prototypes, technical designs, implementation plans, and operational runbooks.
• Explore unfamiliar technologies, customer domains, and AI capabilities with curiosity, speed, and sound engineering judgment.
• Identify when a field-built solution should become a reusable platform capability or reference pattern.

• Design and build production-grade APIs, integrations, workflow automations, data pipelines, internal tools, and customer-facing technical solutions.
• Rapidly prototype ideas, test assumptions with customers, and mature the best ideas into maintainable production systems.
• Integrate UKG with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, data, and related systems using secure, auditable designs.
• Own technical delivery through discovery, design, build, testing, go-live, and early operational handoff.
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs across speed, quality, scalability, security, maintainability, and customer impact.

• Set technical direction for an FDE engagement or major solution area and keep engineering work focused on the customer outcome.
• Guide other FDEs through architecture reviews, pairing, code reviews, technical planning, and high-judgment customer moments.
• Collaborate closely with the engagement PM, customer teams, Product, Engineering, Support, and Security to surface risks, dependencies, and decisions early.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product leaders, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Navigate difficult delivery moments with creativity, perseverance, and a bias toward making progress.

• Contribute reusable components, templates, examples, reference architectures, demos, and implementation notes that accelerate future engagements.
• Provide clear feedback to Product and Engineering on platform gaps, repeatable customer needs, and opportunities to productize field-built solutions.
• Help develop the FDE playbook: better discovery methods, solution patterns, demo assets, tooling, and engineering practices.
• Identify expansion signals and help define the next high-value problems the team should solve for the customer.
• AI-Enabled Workflow Responsibilities
• Identify practical, high-impact uses of AI within existing enterprise workflows.
• Prototype and deploy AI-assisted patterns such as intelligent intake, summarization, recommendations, routing, data extraction, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Design for security, privacy, compliance, explainability, evaluation, monitoring, and operational control from the start.
• Apply sound judgment around model limitations, sensitive data, access controls, failure modes, and responsible use of AI.
• Turn successful AI patterns into reusable implementation guidance for the broader FDE library.

• Curiosity: You genuinely enjoy learning new technologies, customer domains, workflows, and AI capabilities.
• Creativity: You look for novel, elegant ways to solve problems when there is no established playbook.
• Perseverance: You stay resilient through ambiguity, iteration, technical blockers, and changing customer needs.
• Technical judgment: You know when to prototype quickly, when to harden a system, and when to simplify the design.
• Builder's mindset: You prefer making things real - prototypes, code, demos, tools, and production systems.
• Customer empathy: You listen carefully, ask strong questions, and connect technical choices to business outcomes.
• Systems thinking: You understand how people, process, data, and technology interact in real-world environments.
• Leadership: You raise the quality of the team through clarity, mentorship, practical standards, and calm execution.

• Typically 7+ years of experience building software, developer platforms, cloud applications, AI-enabled products, technical solutions, or production integrations.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across APIs, cloud services, data flows, testing, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and operational support.
• Experience designing and deploying production systems or customer-facing technical solutions in ambiguous environments.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction for a workstream, engagement, or complex solution area.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain tradeoffs clearly to technical teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar domains quickly and turning incomplete information into practical technical plans.
• Familiarity with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-enabled tools, LLMs, copilots, workflow automation, or agentic patterns.
• Sound judgment around security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and responsible use of AI.
• Preferred, Not Required
• Enterprise software experience is a differentiator, not a gatekeeper. Exceptional engineers from startup, SaaS, platform, developer tools, AI product, consulting, or modern enterprise software backgrounds are encouraged to apply.
• Experience with HCM, Payroll, Workforce Management, ERP, IAM, SSO, or integration-heavy environments.
• Experience with REST APIs, event-driven systems, ETL/ELT, data pipelines, workflow orchestration, or identity integrations.
• Experience with AI agent patterns such as tools, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Prior experience in a forward-deployed, solutions architecture, sales engineering, consulting engineering, or customer-facing product engineering role.
• Experience turning field-built solutions into reusable product, platform, or reference architecture capabilities.

• Customers reach meaningful value faster because you translated ambiguity into working software.
• High-impact prototypes become stable, secure, maintainable production solutions.
• Customer stakeholders and internal teams trust the technical approach and understand key tradeoffs.
• Reusable assets, patterns, and technical lessons are adopted across the FDE practice and broader engineering organization.
• Product and Engineering receive clear, actionable feedback from the field.
• Other FDEs are more effective because of your technical leadership, mentoring, and example.
• Delivered solutions uncover expansion opportunities and shape future UKG platform capabilities.