Principal, Performance and Capacity Engineer, Workday
Infrastructure & Platform
$217.7-326.6k
Office located in Pleasanton, CA
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR and finance
Open for applications
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR and finance
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$217.7-326.6k
Office located in Pleasanton, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To leverage the power of AI to elevate humans and supercharge work, moving business forever forward.
Role
Who you are
- You're an accomplished Principal Engineer or Technical Architect with extensive experience in designing, building, and scaling highly performant and resilient distributed systems.
- You thrive on tackling complex architectural challenges and possess a deep understanding of system internals, performance tuning, and capacity management in large-scale environments
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant hands-on experience in system-level architecture, performance, resiliency, and scalability for complex distributed systems
- Deep understanding, knowledge, and hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments, including advanced concepts like custom resource definitions, operators, and cluster optimization
- Expertise in distributed computing principles, microservices architectures, and cloud-native patterns, specifically on leading public cloud platforms (AWS and GCP)
- Profound understanding of JVM internals (e.g., garbage collection, memory management, threading) and their impact on application performance and scalability
- Proven ability to design and implement robust, scalable technical architectures and translate broad business requirements into clear, executable design specifications
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with a track record of identifying root causes, proposing innovative solutions, and making data-driven architectural decisions
- Demonstrated experience in technical leadership, including mentoring senior engineers, leading critical technical initiatives, and influencing architectural direction within an engineering organization
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Strong collaborative spirit, enjoying cross-functional teamwork, driving consensus, and fostering a shared understanding of technical goals
- A continuous learning mindset, staying current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in cloud architecture, performance engineering, and system design
- Experience with capacity planning, performance modeling, or cost optimization frameworks in a large-scale cloud environment
What the job involves
- As a Principal Technical Architect on the Capacity Engineering team, you'll be a pivotal leader, shaping the very foundation of Workday's scalability and reliability.
- You'll be responsible for designing and architecting cutting-edge frameworks for capacity engineering across Workday's core and shared services, ensuring our systems can seamlessly handle the demands of our rapidly growing customer base
- This role isn't just about design; it's about hands-on technical leadership and innovation. You'll delve deep into our distributed systems, identifying bottlenecks, defining robust capacity models, and pioneering solutions that push the boundaries of performance and resilience
- Architecting Scalable Frameworks: Design and implement architectural frameworks and tooling for proactive capacity planning, modeling, and management for critical Workday services
- Technical Leadership & Guidance: Provide senior technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and guiding the team on best practices for building scalable, resilient, and performant distributed systems
- System Analysis & Optimization: Conduct in-depth analysis of system performance, resource utilization, and growth patterns to identify optimization opportunities and predict future capacity needs
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with engineering teams, product management, and SREs to integrate capacity insights into the development lifecycle and influence product architecture
- Innovation & Research: Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies, evaluating and recommending new approaches to continuously enhance Workday's scalability and operational efficiency
- This is a unique opportunity to make a profound impact on Workday's core infrastructure, directly influencing the experience of millions of users and ensuring our platform remains world-class in performance and reliability
Our take
Workday is a cloud-based software vendor that provides management of workforces and finances. The company uses a single database for workforce management and financial management to offer integration and optimize business intelligence across companies. It has added to the packages and tools it offers over the years, providing analytic options that allow companies to combine third-party data with information collected by Workday.
The company has also grown through acquisitions and partnerships to broaden its capabilities.. Most recently, in 2025 it purchases Sana, an AI-driven enterprise knowledge and learning platform, to create a "new front door for work". This acquisition allows Workday to integrate Sana's AI-powered search, agents, and learning capabilities with its own data and workflows, allowing employees to access information, automate tasks, and complete their day entirely within Workday.
Through a combination of strategic acquisitions and in-house development, WOrkday has built a comprehensive suite of HR, financial, and enterprise tools. By focusing on innovation and AI-driven workflows, the company continues to push productivity and decision-making for organizations worldwide. Building on this track record, Workday is very much positioned for even more growth, reinforcing its status as a leader in shaping the future of work.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Oct 2011
$85m
SERIES F
Apr 2009
$75m
SERIES E
Total funding: $215.3m
Company HQ
Pleasanton, CA
Leadership
Aneel Bhusri
(Co-Founder & Executive Chair)Annel began his career at Morgan Stanley as a Corporate Finance Analyst. He then spent nearly 6 years at PeopleSoft as a Senior VP before co-founding Workday in 2005, where he has served as the CEO ever since.
Carl Eschenbach
(CEO)Carl joined Workday in 2022 as Co-CEO, becoming CEO in 2024. He has also been a Partner at Sequoia Capital since 2016. Previously, he spent 14 years at VMware as President and COO and 3 years at Inktomi Corporation as the VP of North America Sales.
Peter Bailis
(CTO)Prior to joining Workday in 2025, People was a VP of Engineering at Google. He also previously founded Sisu Data, where he served as the CEO for over 5 years.
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