Senior Software Engineer, Workday
Distributed Systems
$168.5-285.1k
Salary dependent on location
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR, finance & IT
Be an early applicant
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR, finance & IT
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$168.5-285.1k
Salary dependent on location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To leverage the power of AI to elevate humans and supercharge work, moving business forever forward.
Role
Who you are
- 8 years of software engineering/design experience
- 7 years of coding in Python, Go, or Java
- Experience with Linux
- BS in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
- Ability to design, maintain, and optimize Time-Series DBs, document stores, and log collection/management systems
- Solid understanding of distributed tracing concepts (context propagation, spans, sampling) and hands-on experience with tracing tooling
- Public cloud experience (AWS/GCP), including native observability tooling such as AWS CloudWatch and GCP Cloud Operations (Stackdriver)
- Experience with containerization and infrastructure automation (Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Chef, Terraform)
- Experience with service mesh, Prometheus, and cloud-native technologies
- Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel) and a working knowledge of agentic AI build patterns — how agents plan, call tools, hold state, and hand off work across multi-step chains
- A knack for spotting where AI systems quietly go wrong in production: a model call that's suddenly slower than usual, a token bill creeping up for no clear reason, or answers that subtly drift in quality over time. You know how to build the dashboards, alerts, and instrumentation that catch these early — turning "the AI feels off" into a measurable, debuggable signal
- Excellent interpersonal, technical, and communication skills
- Ability to prioritize multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment
- MS Degree a plus
What the job involves
- The Data Platform and Observability team is based in Pleasanton, CA; Boston, MA; and Dublin, Ireland
- We enable real-time insight across Workday's platforms, infrastructure, and applications — including the AI agents and automated workflows that are becoming part of how those applications run
- Our focus is building a large-scale distributed data and observability platform that keeps critical Workday services, and the AI-powered capabilities layered on top of them, fast, reliable, and trustworthy in production
- We handle hundreds of terabytes of data and billions of messages produced daily across Workday's applications and underlying services, powering a platform that tracks over 2 billion time-series in production
- We're also modernizing how we do observability itself — bringing AI-driven approaches like anomaly detection, intelligent alerting, and automated root-cause analysis into the platform, so our systems get smarter about surfacing problems before they become incidents
- If you enjoy writing efficient software, tuning and scaling large distributed systems, and applying AI to make observability itself sharper, you'll enjoy working with us
- Do you want to solve interesting challenges at massive scale, across private and public cloud, for 4,000+ global customers — while helping define what "observability" means for the next generation of AI-driven products?
- Do you want to work alongside world-class engineers building the platforms that make that possible?
- The Data Platform and Observability team is hiring a Senior or Mid-Level Software Engineer. We have a hybrid schedule — you'll collaborate with Workmates in the office while having the flexibility to work up to 50% remote
- Design, build, and improve critical observability services: Monitoring, Logging, Alerting, and Tracing
- Own distributed tracing end to end — instrumenting services, propagating context across service boundaries, and using trace data to understand system behavior and diagnose issues in complex, multi-hop request paths
- Build data capture and collection services using the latest technologies across multiple infrastructure types (Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, bare metal, etc.)
- Design and develop core software modules for real-time and batch data processing
- Build metrics ingestion pipelines, alert definitions, and automation for dashboard lifecycle management
- Instrument AI-powered and automated workflows for performance, cost, and quality, including multi-step processes and tool/service orchestration
- Explore and apply AI-driven observability techniques — anomaly detection, intelligent alerting, and automated root-cause analysis — to reduce noise and speed up incident response
- Partner with product and application teams to define SLOs/SLIs and production-readiness criteria for new services and automated workflows
- Build infrastructure components and deploy them in production
- Work across all aspects of observability with a keen eye for data quality, data integrity, and data availability
- Evaluate and implement new open-source and cloud-native tools and technologies as needed
- Participate in the on-call rotation supporting the observability platform
Application process
- Application deadline: 11/30/2026
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 & CEO)Annel began their career at Morgan Stanley as a Corporate Finance Analyst. They then spent nearly 6 years at PeopleSoft as a Senior VP before co-founding Workday in 2005.
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