Lead Enterprise Solutions Applied AI 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.  

Core Mission
The Lead Applied AI Engineer is a hands-on, forward-deployed technical leader responsible for designing, building, and deploying production-grade agentic AI solutions across the enterprise. The role involves working directly with business units to create autonomous systems that deliver measurable impact. This individual will not only build solutions but also establish standards, reference architectures, and safety guardrails for how agentic AI is developed and scaled responsibly throughout the organization.

The position is for a "builder" who can translate complex business workflows into automated, agent-driven processes while navigating the realities of an enterprise environment, including security, governance, and user trust.

Key Responsibilities

This is a hybrid role-blending hands-on solution delivery with platform-level strategy.

1. Forward-Deployed Solution Delivery (60% of time)
Lead Agentic AI Initiatives: Serve as the embedded technical leader within business units to translate needs into robust, enterprise-integrated agentic AI solutions, overseeing the full lifecycle from idea to implementation and monitoring.
Enterprise System Integration: Connect AI agents to diverse enterprise platforms (e.g., Salesforce, SAP, legacy databases, APIs), ensuring seamless integration and production-ready performance through rapid iteration and troubleshooting.
Pilot Management & Knowledge Transfer: Oversee pilot launches, provide user training, and develop thorough documentation to support smooth adoption and transition of AI solutions to business stakeholders.

2. Agentic System Architecture & Engineering (25% of time)
Design and build multi-agent AI systems that automate complex business processes, emphasizing agent orchestration and human in the loop concepts.
Transform human workflows into agent-first processes, ensuring effective automation while identifying necessary human oversight points.
Develop evaluation tools and optimize solutions for performance and cost, maintaining high quality throughout deployment and operation.

3. Platform Contributions & Standardization (15% of time)
Create Reusable Assets: Extract successful patterns from fieldwork to create libraries, templates, and reference implementations for other teams to use.
Set Enterprise Standards: Define production-ready reference architectures and official checklists for security, reliability, and operability.
Enable Governance & Safety: Partner with Security and Governance teams to embed safety guardrails, audit logging, and compliance checks into core agent architectures.
Mentorship and Enablement: Author best practices, lead technical reviews, and mentor other engineers to help them ship agentic solutions independently.

Required Qualifications
Over 10 years of experience in software engineering. More than 5 years building AI and machine learning systems. 3+ years delivering AI solutions that create real business results in production.
Leadership experience guiding technical direction and aligning teams.
Skilled with large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and agent frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex.
Hands-on with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and using tools or functions within AI agents.
Proficient in Python, with strong knowledge of frontend development for agent UIs-React, TypeScript, APIs, authentication, and building reliable production systems.
Experience integrating with business systems (CRMs, ERPs, HR platforms).
Strong understanding of enterprise security, compliance, and data governance.
Deep understanding of OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Azure OpenAI, and agent frameworks such as Microsoft Agent Framework, Vertex AI Agent Builder, and Semantic Kernel.
Knowledge of vector databases like MongoDB, Pinecone, Weaviate, and Qdrant, Graph databased for knowledge representation.
Experienced with cloud services (Azure, GCP), container tools (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.
Skilled with logging, tracing, and monitoring tools for AI applications.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Industrial Technology or Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Ideal Candidate Profile: Who Thrives in This Role

Builders Over Theorists: You love shipping working software more than debating architecture. You have debugged authentication issues at 2am and resolved production incidents.

Field-Focused Problem Solvers: You get energized by sitting with users, understanding their pain, and building something that makes their day better. You are comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete requirements.

Pragmatic Technologists: You choose boring, reliable solutions over shiny new frameworks. You know when to use an agent and when a simple script is better. You balance innovation with delivery.

Translators: You can explain technical tradeoffs to executives and business requirements to engineers. You bridge worlds.

Standard Setters: You turn one-off successes into repeatable systems—templates, guardrails, evaluation suites, and reference architectures that scale across teams.

Entrepreneurial Mindset: You treat each business unit like a customer. You understand ROI, adoption, and change management matter as much as code quality.

Comfortable with Constraints: You know how to work within enterprise reality—security reviews, compliance requirements, budget constraints—without letting them kill momentum.

Generous Collaborators: You mentor others, share your learnings, and make the team better. You default to clear documentation and proactive communication.

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