Principal, Software Development Engineer

Your work days are brighter here.

We're obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we're shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you'll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We're in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you'll do meaningful work with Workmates who've got your back. In return, we'll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you've found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too.

About the Team

The Data Platform and Observability team is based in Pleasanton CA, Boston MA, Atlanta GA, Dublin Ireland and Chennai India

We enable real time insights across Workday's applications. Our focus is on the development of a large scale data platform to support critical Workday applications. Our platform helps the Workday applications to be highly available and derive insights into data with highly efficient utilization of data services.

The team provides software for collection and storage of critical data assets. We handle Petabytes of data in the form of trillions of messages produced monthly and millions of messages/sec in our stream processing pipeline. In our world every optimization and millisecond gained matters.

If you enjoy writing software that scales or tuning and scaling large distributed systems you will enjoy working with us.

Do you want to work on using Workday's vast computing resources with its rich and extensive datasets? If so, we should chat

About the Role

• You will design and build our distributed systems that underpin our Observability services. You will build software modules that are used by all of Workday's engineering teams.

• You will build Stream processing software to ingest, process, enrich and store various Observability data assets.

• You will work with all aspects of data processing with a keen eye for data quality, data integrity and data availability.

• You will evaluate/implement new open source and cloud native tools and technologies, as needed.

• You will collaborate with experts in Security, Infrastructure and product engineering.

• You will debug, solve and scale distributed systems. You will participate in the on-call rotation supporting the data platform.

• Architect, design and build critical Kubernetes orchestrated Data Platform and Infrastructure services that need high reliability and availability at scale.

• Drive significant technology initiatives end to end and across the Workday technology organization.

• You will build a distributed and highly available data processing framework for moving data from a variety of source systems to various persistence stores.

• Build Stream processing software to ingest, process, enrich and store various data assets.

• Work on aspects of data processing with a keen eye for data quality, data integrity and data availability.

• Evaluate/implement new open source and cloud native tools and technologies.

• Provide technical leadership and be a role model to software engineers pursuing technical career path in engineering

• Participate in the on-call rotation

About You

15+ years of software engineering, architecture, systems, infrastructure and platforms experience. Deep expertise in distributed systems and prior experience running large scale SaaS platforms. Deep systems and networking expertise working on hybrid environments, both on-premise and cloud.

Excellent record of high achievements in the area of architecture, implementation and operations across at least 3-4 services and products.

Proven record of mentoring workmates in the double digits at various career levels and helping them grow within the organization.

Basic Qualifications

• You must have hands-on experience in atleast one of the following Observability domains (Metrics & Alerts, Logs, Traces, Events). Ideal candidate will have solid expertise in more than one domain.

• You have strong working experience with containers(docker), container orchestration(kubernetes), Service Mesh(istio), open telemetry, public cloud(AWS preferred)

• You have hands-on experience with building high performance data ingestion software and solving for concurrency, latency and throughput.

• Experience with at least one of the following software development languages: Golang, Python and Java.

• Experience with Cloud infrastructure automation - Terraform, ArgoCD, chef, etc

• You must collaborate with a global team across multiple timezones. Effective partnership is important.

• Ability to deal with a high degree of ambiguity and handle things with autonomy.

• Ability to prioritize multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment.

• Able to influence and communicate effectively with both technical, non-technical people and engineering executives.

Other Qualifications

• You understand the internals of technologies like Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse etc.

• Solid understanding of big data technologies like Apache Spark, Trino, Hive, Presto etc.

• You have great understanding and hands-on experience in AI/ML as applied to Observability domain.

• Strong mentoring skills

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

At Workday, we value our candidates' privacy and data security.  Workday will never ask candidates to apply to jobs through websites that are not Workday Careers. 

Please be aware of sites that may ask for you to input your data in connection with a job posting that appears to be from Workday but is not.

In addition, Workday will never ask candidates to pay a recruiting fee, or pay for consulting or coaching services, in order to apply for a job at Workday.

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