Sr Software Development Engineer

Job Description

Your work days are brighter here.

At Workday, it all began with a conversation over breakfast. When our founders met at a sunny California diner, they came up with an idea to revolutionize the enterprise software market. And when we began to rise, one thing that really set us apart was our culture. A culture which was driven by our value of putting our people first. And ever since, the happiness, development, and contribution of every Workmate is central to who we are. Our Workmates believe a healthy employee-centric, collaborative culture is the essential mix of ingredients for success in business. That's why we look after our people, communities and the planet while still being profitable. Feel encouraged to shine, however that manifests: you don't need to hide who you are. You can feel the energy and the passion, it's what makes us unique. Inspired to make a brighter work day for all and transform with us to the next stage of our growth journey Bring your brightest version of you and have a brighter work day here.

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About the Team

Performance Resiliency and Scalability team are of highly skilled Performance and Scalability Engineers dedicated to ensuring the end-to-end performance of Workday software. Our mission is to engineer every component of the technology stack, from hardware architectures and network topologies to software algorithms and configurations. We achieve this by deeply analyzing workloads and correlating key performance indicators across complex systems.

About the Role

This role is for a highly skilled Performance and Scalability Engineer responsible for ensuring the end-to-end performance of Workday's software and core platform. You will leverage your deep understanding of hardware components, distributed systems, and software architectures to identify and analyze performance bottlenecks by executing highly scalable benchmarks. Your core responsibilities will include correlating key performance indicators across the entire technology stack-from hardware and kernel to the application layer-to propose and initiate improvements in algorithms, architectures, and system configurations. You will collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to perform capacity planning and develop solutions that not only resolve scalability challenges but also enable better resource utilization, ultimately yielding an excellent end-user experience.

About You

Basic Qualification

- 8+ years of experience in software development engineering, with a distinguished track record of architecting, building, and scaling robust and efficient software systems.

- 8+ years of expertise in performance engineering, reliability engineering, and scalability engineering.

- Deep industry experience in performance analysis, benchmarking, and end-to-end system tuning to resolve complex performance bottlenecks.

- Extensive Public Cloud Experience: Proven ability to define and execute performance, scalability, and capacity planning benchmarks across cloud architectures (e.g., AWS, GCP).

- Distributed Systems Expertise: Strong background in system architectures, high-performance computing, and distributed systems, with experience in building and automating complex workload models.

- Problem-Solving & Collaboration: The ability to identify software and hardware limitations by correlating metrics from Hardware, OS, Kernel, and Software. Must have excellent written and oral communication skills to collaborate with engineering teams on recommendations and solutions.

- Foundational Knowledge: A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualification

- Hands-on experience with load testing tools (e.g., JMeter, Gatling), Java profiling tools (e.g., JProfiler, JConsole, DynaTrace), and system-level metrics analysis (e.g., sar, vmstat, iostat).

- Strong background in SQL, MySQL, and/or distributed computing frameworks including Redis, Kafka, Zookeeper

- Deep knowledge of Java internals, including JVM performance tuning and garbage collection algorithms.

- Experience in Web Application Development, administering application servers (e.g., Tomcat), and developing Web Services (REST or SOAP).

- Proficiency in UNIX or Linux environments, demonstrating comfort with command-line tools and system-level operations.

- A proven track record of building and automating complex workload models for distributed systems.

- Exceptional written and oral communication skills to clearly characterize system performance and document findings.

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we're combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote home office roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Are you being referred to one of our roles If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process