Sr Prin IT Service Operations Specialist

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
Operations is evolving from application support into an enterprise capability that engineers reliable, observable, secure, and increasingly intelligent services. The Enterprise Operations Architect will shape this evolution across enterprise applications and services, including Salesforce, Dynamics 365, integration platforms, and ServiceNow.
The role defines operational architecture, standards, and roadmaps that make services easier to monitor, support, recover, secure, and improve. It establishes end-to-end observability across technology and business transactions and leads the evaluation, design, and implementation of AI and automation solutions. Working across domain teams, engineering, security, business stakeholders, vendors, and managed service partners, the architect translates strategy into production-ready capabilities and measurable outcomes.
Key Responsibilities
Operational architecture and service design

• Define target operational architecture, including service boundaries, dependencies, ownership, resiliency, supportability, and lifecycle requirements.
• Create and maintain reference architectures, patterns, standards, and decision records for readiness, monitoring, alerting, integrations, recovery, knowledge, and automation.
• Engage early with application and solution architects so new capabilities are observable, secure, supportable, and ready for transition to operations.
• Establish onboarding and operational acceptance criteria covering service maps, runbooks, access, support models, alert routing, recovery procedures, and measures.
• Identify architectural risks, single points of failure, technical debt, and recurring operational demand; drive prioritized remediation with accountable owners.

Resilience, observability, and operational excellence

• Define resilience and operational-excellence standards based on service criticality, dependencies, recovery readiness, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with continuity, security, engineering, and service owners to assess business impact and establish recovery strategies, including RTO and RPO where applicable.
• Ensure continuity and disaster-recovery requirements are embedded in service maps, runbooks, escalation paths, communications, support models, and exercises; track gaps to closure.
• Define service-level indicators, objectives, health models, instrumentation, actionable alert thresholds, and escalation paths that minimize avoidable noise.
• Establish event-management patterns for enrichment, deduplication, correlation, dependency context, assignment, and ServiceNow incident creation or updates.
• Lead service mapping and dependency discovery; improve CMDB and operational data quality, dashboards, analytics, incident learning, knowledge, and improvement backlogs.

AI, automation, and knowledge enablement

• Build a use-case-led AI and automation roadmap, prioritizing opportunities by value, volume, risk, feasibility, and measurable service or capacity impact.
• Assess AI capabilities, vendors, and platforms; lead architecture reviews, proofs of concept, technical due diligence, and adoption recommendations.
• Design capabilities for incident triage and routing, knowledge retrieval, diagnostics, major incident support, problem detection, change-risk insight, and runbook automation.
• Connect approved incidents, problems, changes, service maps, knowledge, runbooks, and observability signals while defining production requirements for integration, data, security, privacy, auditability, human approval, confidence, fallback, and monitoring.

Governance, delivery, and influence

• Set governance for observability, AI, automation, and operational architecture while balancing enterprise consistency with platform needs.
• Align ServiceNow workflows, CMDB, ITSM processes, knowledge, event management, and automation with the target operating model.
• Partner with internal teams, managed service providers, and vendors to embed standards, validate solutions, improve outcomes, and reduce avoidable effort.
• Coach operations teams and subject-matter experts in architecture thinking, reliability, observability, AI solution design, and continuous improvement.
• Measure and report adoption, coverage, alert quality, detection and diagnosis time, recurrence, automation, user experience, and realized capacity or cost benefits.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Substantial experience in enterprise architecture, application or platform operations, site reliability engineering, observability, IT service management, or technology transformation in a complex enterprise.
• Demonstrated ability to design end-to-end monitoring and observability across SaaS applications, integrations, data flows, and business services, including metrics, logs, traces, health indicators, event correlation, dashboards, and alert management.
• Strong knowledge of integration patterns, APIs, identity and access, data flows, cloud or SaaS architecture, resilience, security, and operational controls.
• Ability to create architecture artifacts and roadmaps, facilitate decisions, and communicate trade-offs to technical and executive audiences.
• Strong stakeholder leadership across engineering, operations, security, business teams, vendors, and managed service partners.
• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, ServiceNow, and integration platforms such as Informatica IICS or equivalent; Grafana experience is advantageous.
• Experience with AIOps, event management, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, operational knowledge models, knowledge graphs, SLOs, service mapping, operational readiness, or reliability engineering across multiple domains.
• Relevant architecture, cloud, ServiceNow, observability, security, or AI certifications are advantageous.

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

For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email UKGCareers@ukg.com