Principal Software Development Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

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 Multi-Cloud Platform Engineering team is the architectural backbone of Workday. We don’t simply consume cloud infrastructure, we engineer the abstraction layer that allows one of the world’s largest enterprise SaaS platforms to operate seamlessly across AWS and GCP. Our team develops the core infrastructure services, automation frameworks, and operational tooling that power Workday’s multi-cloud environment. These platform capabilities are used by internal engineering teams, consultants, and technical partners to provision environments, onboard customers, and operate the Workday platform at scale. We work at the nexus of distributed systems, infrastructure engineering, and platform reliability, tackling complex technical challenges while empowering the broader engineering organization to innovate faster and operate more safely in the cloud. About the Role As a Principal Software Engineer, you will shape the technical direction and long-term architecture of Workday’s multi-cloud platform. You will lead the design of large-scale distributed systems, drive cross-team initiatives, and influence platform strategy across the organization. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, combined with the ability to provide sound technical solutions to meet business requirements, solve complex technical challenges and drive alignment across multiple teams.

Requirements

• 12+ years building large-scale distributed systems or infrastructure platforms
• Deep experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, or Oracle) at scale
• Strong production-hardened expertise with Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem
• Proven experience designing scalable and resilient distributed systems
• Strong development experience in Go
• Experience with Python, Ruby, or Linux-based automation/scripting

Nice To Haves

• Experience building internal platforms used by multiple engineering teams
• Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure (networking, storage, compute)
• Experience leading large multi-quarter cross-organizational technical initiatives
• Strong background in automation, CI/CD, and platform engineering
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without direct authority

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of multi-cloud platform services , ensuring they are secure, scalable, and highly available.
• Design and deliver large-scale, resilient distributed systems that support mission-critical workloads with strong performance and reliability guarantees.
• Drive cross-organizational technical strategy and initiatives to improve reliability, scalability, performance, and operational excellence across the platform.
• Identify, define, and drive solutions for complex, ambiguous platform challenges that span multiple teams, domains, and services.
• Establish and champion best practices for distributed systems design, reliability, observability, and automation, and ensure they are adopted across engineering teams.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and staff engineers , raising the overall technical bar and fostering a culture of engineering excellence.
• Improve end-to-end observability, reliability, and automated recovery for platform services, including proactive detection, self-healing, and robust incident response.
• Accelerate onboarding of new customers, regions, and products through automation , standardization, and repeatable platform patterns.
• Drive cloud efficiency and infrastructure optimization at scale , including cost optimization, capacity planning, and effective use of cloud-native capabilities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees