Forward Deployed Engineer III - Eng

Job description Company and benefits

Job ID FORWA019289 Employment Type Regular Work Style hybrid Location Seattle,WA,United States Travel Up to 50% Role Forward Deployed Engineer III - 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.

Role Overview

Forward Deployed Engineers solve problems that do not yet have playbooks. They sit close to customers and close to the code: learning the customer's world, identifying where software and AI can change how work gets done, and building the production systems that make those ideas real.

At UKG, you will partner directly with customers to understand complex HCM, Payroll, and Workforce Management challenges, rapidly prototype new ideas, and deliver high-quality integrations, automations, and AI-enabled workflows that create measurable customer value.

This is an engineering-first, customer-facing role for builders who are curious about how businesses work, creative in how they solve problems, and persistent enough to keep iterating until the solution works in the real world. You do not need to arrive as an enterprise HCM expert. You do need to be a strong engineer with the curiosity to learn unfamiliar domains, the creativity to design novel solutions, and the perseverance to work through ambiguity.

At the Forward Deployed Engineer III level, you will typically own a customer workstream or technical solution area, with guidance from Staff and Principal FDEs on broader engagement strategy. You will be expected to build independently, communicate clearly, and contribute reusable patterns that help the broader team move faster.

Why This Role Matters

The best FDEs do more than implement software. They discover patterns, invent better ways to solve customer problems, and turn what works in the field into reusable capabilities that shape the future of the platform.

In this role, your work will help enterprise customers adopt UKG's platform and emerging AI capabilities faster, while giving Product and Engineering direct insight into what customers need next. You will be close to the problem, close to the customer, and close to the code.

What You'll Build

• Production-grade APIs, integrations, workflow automations, data pipelines, and customer-facing technical solutions.
• AI-assisted workflows such as intelligent intake, summarization, routing, recommendations, data extraction, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Reusable templates, reference architectures, examples, and internal tools that make future engagements faster and more repeatable.
• Secure, auditable solutions that connect UKG with HCM, Payroll, WFM, ERP, IAM, and related systems.
• Prototypes that help customers and internal teams quickly understand what is possible, then mature the best ideas into production.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customers to understand business challenges, technical constraints, and opportunities for innovation.
• Own technical delivery for a customer workstream from discovery through design, build, testing, go-live, and early operational handoff.
• Rapidly prototype ideas, test assumptions, iterate from customer feedback, and convert successful prototypes into maintainable production systems.
• Build high-quality software components, integrations, APIs, event-driven workflows, data pipelines, and automation.
• Translate ambiguous customer needs into clear technical designs, implementation plans, and operational runbooks.
• Explore unfamiliar technologies, customer domains, and AI capabilities with curiosity, speed, and sound engineering judgment.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to identify platform gaps, repeatable customer needs, and opportunities to productize field-built solutions.
• Contribute reusable components, templates, reference patterns, and implementation notes that accelerate future delivery.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to customer stakeholders, internal engineering teams, product leaders, and executives.
• Navigate difficult delivery moments with creativity, perseverance, and a bias toward making progress.

AI-Enabled Workflow Responsibilities

• Help customers identify practical, high-impact uses of AI within existing enterprise workflows.
• Prototype and implement AI-enabled automation patterns within approved security, privacy, and compliance guardrails.
• Integrate AI capabilities into existing systems and processes using secure, auditable designs.
• Design human-in-the-loop workflows that balance automation, accuracy, explainability, and operational control.
• Apply good judgment when working with sensitive data, access controls, evaluation, monitoring, and failure modes.
• Contribute reusable AI workflow examples, implementation notes, and lessons learned to the FDE library.

What Makes You Successful

Successful FDEs combine strong engineering judgment with a builder's mindset and deep customer empathy. In this role, the following traits matter as much as specific domain experience:

• 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.
• 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.
• Engineering discipline: You move fast, but you care about quality, maintainability, reliability, and security.
• Communication: You can explain complex tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience building software, developer platforms, cloud applications, AI-enabled products, technical solutions, or production integrations.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including APIs, cloud services, data flows, testing, deployment, monitoring, and debugging.
• Experience building and deploying production systems or customer-facing technical solutions.
• Comfort working in ambiguous environments, learning new domains quickly, and iterating toward outcomes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills in customer-facing or cross-functional environments.
• Ability to translate business requirements and technical constraints into practical, working solutions.
• 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, and responsible use of AI.

Preferred Qualifications:

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 contributing reusable frameworks, templates, internal tools, or reference architectures.
• Familiarity with agent patterns such as tools, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Experience working directly with customers, users, or business stakeholders to turn ambiguous needs into working software.

Success Metrics:

• Customers reach meaningful value faster through delivered solutions.
• Production go-lives are stable, well-documented, and maintainable.
• Reusable assets and patterns are adopted across the FDE team and broader engineering organization.
• Product and Engineering receive clear, actionable feedback from customer engagements.
• Customer stakeholders trust the technical approach and understand key tradeoffs.
• Delivered solutions uncover expansion opportunities and shape future platform capabilities

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.

Equal Opportunity Employer

UKG is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories.

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UKG participates in E-Verify.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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 [email protected].

The pay range for this position is $102,300 to $169,000. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG’s benefits and rewards at https://www.ukg.com/about-us/careers/benefits

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UKG will never ask you for a copy of your driver’s license, social security card, or passport during a job inter

ABOUT OUR JOB DESCRIPTIONS

All job descriptions are written to accurately reflect the open job and include general work responsibilities. They do not present a comprehensive, detailed inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required for the job. Management reserves the right to revise the job or require that other or different tasks be performed if or when circumstances change.