Senior Cybersecurity Data Engineer - Data Platform & Lakehouse SME

Workday • Boulder, CO

1d • $144,400 - $258,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to serve as the subject matter expert for data platform and lakehouse architecture on a newly formed Cybersecurity Data Engineering & Enablement Team. The team is developing a centralized, cloud-native security data lakehouse that unifies enterprise security telemetry and supports threat hunters, data scientists, and incident responders with trusted intelligence.

This role focuses on building scalable, resilient, secure, cost-effective, and self-service platform infrastructure rather than developing everyday data pipelines. The engineer will shape the platform architecture and developer experience, operate and optimize the core data platform, and provide technical leadership across the data organization. The position also involves collaboration with Data Engineering, Cybersecurity Engineering, and Product teams, as well as monitoring AWS costs and planning capacity as data volumes grow.

The role is based in the United States, with the primary location listed as Reston, Virginia. Workday’s flexible-work approach calls for spending at least half of each quarter in an office or in the field with customers, prospects, or partners; remote home-office employees may also attend important in-person events.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in data platform engineering, DevOps, or data infrastructure.
• At least 2 years of experience operating in a senior or lead capacity.
• At least 3 years of hands-on experience building or migrating modern data lakehouse architectures, such as Databricks, Snowflake, Delta Lake, or Apache Iceberg.
• At least 3 years of production-level experience across the AWS data stack, specifically AWS EMR (including Spark/Presto/Trino tuning), AWS Athena, S3 infrastructure, and AWS Lake Formation.
• At least 3 years of production experience writing, deploying, and maintaining infrastructure as code using Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL, including performance tuning and query optimization.
• Proficiency in Python or Bash for infrastructure automation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing, administering, and optimizing modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, or AWS Redshift.
• Experience with cluster sizing and workload management.
• Experience setting up multi-region data lakes, cross-account data sharing, or data mesh architectures.
• Experience with open-source query engines such as Trino or StarRocks.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize cloud-native data lakehouse architecture, including efficient separation of compute and storage.
• Build self-service tools, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code templates so Data Engineers can deploy, test, and manage pipelines autonomously.
• Oversee the reliability, observability, security, and scaling of the core data platform.
• Implement monitoring and automated remediation for infrastructure bottlenecks.
• Break down technical challenges involving high-volume data processing, distributed compute limits, and query optimization into manageable solutions.
• Evaluate open-source and commercial technologies, design proofs of concept, and mentor engineers on platform best practices.
• Partner with Data Engineering, Cybersecurity Engineering, and Product teams to gather requirements and co-design infrastructure supporting their roadmaps.
• Monitor, alert on, and optimize AWS data spend; perform capacity planning for anticipated data-volume growth.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission or bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Workday describes a flexible-work approach with flexibility to shape schedules around business, team, and personal needs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed