Senior Software Engineer(Distributed Systems)

Your work days are brighter here.

Were 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 were shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join youll 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. Were 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 youre building smarter solutions supporting customers or creating a space where everyone belongs youll do meaningful work with Workmates whove got your return well 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 youve found a match in Workday and we hope to be a match for you too.

About the Team

The Data Platform and Observability Engineering (DPOE) team is building Workdays next-generation multi-petabyte scale Observability Platform. We own the libraries distributed services and infrastructure that power ingestion storage and query across the observability stack Iceberg ClickHouse Tempo Grafana S3 Kafka and Elasticsearch serving traces metrics and logs for every workload at Workday. Our roadmap directly shapes how the company detects diagnoses and eventually predicts operational issues at scale.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Development Engineer you will own the technical design and execution for core components of Workdays distributed tracing platform built on ClickHouse and/or Grafana Tempo and backed by a big-data pipeline (Kafka Spark/Flink Iceberg S3). This is a hands-on role where you will tackle multi-petabyte scale challenges optimize low-latency infrastructure and help lay the technical groundwork for Observability AI.
You will drive engineering excellence within the team mentor other developers and act as a domain expert for tracing ingestion storage and query performance

About You

Basic Qualification

8 years experience in software development engineering.

4 years experience specifically focused on designing building and operating complex distributed system architectures evidenced by successful deployment of systems with high availability (e.g. 99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance.

5 years experience with at least two of the following programming languages Java Go Scala Python including experience in writing production-level code for distributed systems.

Bachelors degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science Engineering or a related discipline; a Masters degree (e.g. MS in Computer Science Distributed Systems or related field) is strongly preferred or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualification

Strong ability in Algorithmic Thinking including to build highly efficient and scalable solutions for complex high-throughput data ingestion and sub-second query performance challenges.

Solid experience in API Development including an understanding of gRPC REST and OpenTelemetry (OTLP) with practical experience designing and building scalable distributed APIs for observability data.

Strong understanding of Code Testing methodologies such as distributed load testing and integration testing and experience contributing to end-to-end telemetry pipeline testing and CI/CD automation.

Solid understanding of Distributed Systems Software principles including data partitioning eventual consistency and fault tolerance mechanisms with hands-on experience in Kafka Spark Flink or ClickHouse.

Experience implementing and maintaining High Availability strategies for critical distributed systems including multi-AZ deployments robust retry mechanisms and automated failover.

Practical experience with Large Scale Data Processing technologies and frameworks such as Apache Kafka Spark Flink and Apache Iceberg within complex distributed architectures.

Good understanding of Large Scale Systems design principles including distributed data sharding replication and query optimization and experience working on observability pipelines or data lake platforms.

Strong understanding of Object-Oriented Design (OOD) principles and architectural patterns for building highly scalable and maintainable distributed systems.

Experience with Source Control Management (SCM) tools such as Git and GitHub/Bitbucket and following best practices for collaborative distributed development workflows.

Strong understanding of System Security principles and best practices relevant to securing distributed environments including mutual TLS (mTLS) multi-tenant authorization (authz) and data encryption.

Proven ability to actively collaborate within and across distributed software development teams and contribute constructively to architectural discussions and system designs.

Strong skills in creating Technical Writing Documentation for runbooks system design specs and API documentation related to distributed systems architecture and design.

Workday Pay Transparency Statement

The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. 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. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidates compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including but not limited to geography experience skills job duties and business need among other things. For more information regarding Workdays comprehensive benefits please click here.

Primary Location:

Primary Location Base Pay Range: $190100 USD - $285100 USD

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $160100 USD - $285100 USD

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work were 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 youll 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.

Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision-making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran due to a disability or for religious reasons or as otherwise provided under applicable law.

Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy requesting one or more work accommodations exercising a privacy right or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.

If you require a reasonable accommodation you may email as far in advance as possible.

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.