Senior Manager Data Engineering

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

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Data & AI Engineering to lead a team building trusted enterprise data products and production-ready AI capabilities. This leader will own engineering delivery across data pipelines, semantic models, enterprise context layers, and AI agent integrations, helping teams turn complex enterprise data into reliable business insights and actions.

The role combines people leadership, architectural judgment, and delivery accountability. You will partner with business, architecture, cross functional leaders to prioritize high-value use cases, establish engineering standards, and measure business outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead the team: Recruit, coach, and develop data and AI engineers. Establish clear ownership, development plans, and accountability for engineering quality and delivery.
• Deliver enterprise data products: Lead the development of scalable ingestion and transformation pipelines, curated datasets, and reusable data products across business domains.
• Develop AI-ready data capabilities: Guide semantic modeling, metadata pipelines, knowledge graph integrations, and enterprise context services that provide AI applications with consistent business definitions and relationships.
• Own production readiness: Establish service expectations, monitoring, incident response, support handovers, and cost controls for data pipelines and AI services.
• Manage delivery and partnerships: Own roadmaps, capacity planning, technical dependencies, and delivery across multiple initiatives.
• Demonstrate business value: Track data reliability, delivery performance, AI answer quality, adoption, time saved, and operating costs to guide investment decisions.
  
  

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 10+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, or related disciplines, including 3+ years leading Data engineering teams.
• Proven experience delivering and supporting enterprise data platforms and business-critical data pipelines.
• Strong technical foundation in SQL, Python, dimensional modeling, distributed processing, and cloud architecture.
• Experience with Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Composer/Airflow, and Dataform, or comparable cloud technologies.
• Practical experience delivering AI-enabled applications, including LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, tool calling, and evaluation.
• Understanding of semantic models, metadata management, knowledge graphs, and their role in grounding AI responses.
• Experience implementing automated testing, CI/CD, data quality monitoring, and production support practices.
• Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities, lead cross-functional delivery, and communicate technical decisions clearly.
  
  

Company Overview

UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management, built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by people-first AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. That's why more than 80,000 organizations worldwide trust UKG to run their workforce — not just manage it. 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

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