Senior Software Development Engineer, Workday
$156-234k
As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants
More information about 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
$156-234k
As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants
More information about 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
- 6+ years of related work experience in software development, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
- Software Development and Distributed Systems: Deep experience designing, building, and scaling production-grade distributed systems. You understand the full software development lifecycle - from coding standards and testing to code reviews, source control, and deployment, and can apply that knowledge to complex, high-throughput platforms
- Python: Deep proficiency in Python, with extensive experience writing production-level code and building systems in Python-based frameworks
- Kubernetes & GPU Infrastructure: Deep hands-on experience deploying and scaling workloads on Kubernetes, with a specific focus on GPU resource management. You understand how to optimize GPU utilization for hosting and tuning smaller open-weight LLMs using modern inference engines (e.g., vLLM, TGI). Familiarity with GPU memory constraints, serving tuned models (e.g., LoRA), and autoscaling hardware metrics
- LLMs and Traditional ML Models: Familiarity with both large language models and traditional ML models, including how they are served, scaled, and monitored in production. You understand the operational differences and can design abstractions that serve both effectively
- Observability: You can design and maintain monitoring strategies that provide clear insight into system health, performance, and cost
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear design documents, articulate complex technical ideas, and build consensus across teams
- Mentorship: A collaborative approach to engineering, with experience mentoring other engineers and fostering an inclusive team environment
What the job involves
- The AI Model Serving team is the engine behind every production Workday agent and machine learning use case. We own the services that power all production AI workloads, acting as both the gateway to vendor-hosted LLMs (GCP, AWS Bedrock, Gemini) and the primary platform where Workday hosts and scales its internal models
- We operate at scale, hosting thousands of traditional ML models across sharded Ray Serve clusters and maintaining Workday's production model registry. Our platform consistently handles ~2,000 requests per second, peaking at over 10,000 RPS in our largest clusters
- In the year ahead, our engineering roadmap is highly ambitious. We are focused on:
- Scaling Architecture: Upgrading our systems to seamlessly support 20+ new AI agents going into production
- Hosting Open-Weight LLMs: Designing the infrastructure to host and tune open-source LLMs directly within our stack
- Performance & Reliability: Architecting optimizations to drive down core latency while maintaining the rock-solid stability our high-throughput production systems demand
- Enterprise Governance: Hardening our unified vendor interface and implementing advanced cost-governance controls
- Our culture is built on focus, camaraderie, and high performance. We are a friendly, dedicated group that takes pride in building and operating one of the most heavily used services at Workday. If you are energized by working on the infrastructure that sits at the very heart of Workday's AI strategy, this is the team for you
- As either a Senior Software Development Engineer on the AI Model Serving team, you will be a technical leader who helps shape the vision and direction of the platform alongside the engineering manager. You will play a central role in making critical design decisions, driving outcomes across the team, and setting a positive and inclusive team culture
- Your work will directly impact Workday's ability to serve AI at scale — from traditional ML models to the latest large language models powering Workday's agents
- Lead the team technically by making critical design decisions that drive performance, reliability, and scalability across the platform
- Design, implement, and maintain large-scale systems that enable moving ML models to production
- Write design documents to build consensus for new system components and enhancements to existing components
- Evaluate and uptake new technologies made available within Workday and across the broader industry
- Troubleshoot, improve, and scale continuous integration software pipelines
- Develop relationships with software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists on partner teams
- Respond to alerts and debug production issues to maintain platform health and reliability
- Review pull requests and enforce consistency, performance, readability, and security across code bases
- Develop documentation to share knowledge with other engineers
Application process
- End Date: October 5, 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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