Senior Software Development Engineer - Developer Platform

Workday•Boulder, CO

1d•$160,100 - $285,100•Hybrid

About The Position

The Developer Platform team is building the foundation for Workday's open developer ecosystem. We design and deliver the platform capabilities, APIs, SDKs, and developer-facing services that enable external developers and partners to build on Workday products—including Peakon, HiredScore, VNDLY, and more. Our mission is to make the platform reliable, extensible, and straightforward for developers to adopt and extend. We work closely with principal engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to turn platform growth goals into well-scoped, high-quality engineering work. We care deeply about technical craft, give direct and constructive feedback, and celebrate shipping capabilities that developers actually want to use. If you are energized by hands-on platform implementation, contributing to architecture decisions, and helping other engineers grow, you will find a collaborative team that values thoughtful execution and makes the work enjoyable along the way. As a Senior Development Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will design and build core platform capabilities that advance Workday toward a more extensible, developer-friendly ecosystem. You will deliver high-impact technical work, contribute to architecture and API/SDK design, and collaborate across product and engineering teams to ship reliable, scalable services consumed by internal and external developers.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, including senior‑level ownership of web or platform services in production.
4+ years experience designing, developing, and deploying distributed systems.
Experience designing and building capabilities for developer platforms, developer portals, or other external‑facing surfaces used by third‑party developers or partners.
Hands-on experience building and operating cloud‑native services (for example on GCP, AWS, or Azure), including responsibility for availability, performance, and basic observability (logging, metrics, and alerting).
Experience working with modern web technologies and APIs (for example, TypeScript/JavaScript, React, and REST/GraphQL) in a production environment.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Clear understanding of developer experience (DX) as a quality bar, with the ability to apply that lens when making design and implementation decisions for platform capabilities.
Hands-on expertise with cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes, including the ability to deploy, operate, and troubleshoot production services on GCP, AWS, or Azure.
Strong API design fundamentals, including REST, GraphQL, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, and versioning best practices, with the ability to apply these to build reliable, well-documented public APIs.
Demonstrated ability to lead technical work end-to-end within a team—from design through delivery—with minimal oversight and sound judgment on scope, tradeoffs, and quality.
Experience building software consumed by external developers or partners in an enterprise SaaS environment, with an understanding of the reliability and compatibility expectations that public platform surfaces require.
Experience mentoring engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing, with the ability to raise the technical bar on a team through example and constructive guidance.
Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to adapt style to different audiences and collaborate effectively across product, engineering, and developer-facing teams.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to agentic AI capabilities, including LLM-backed services, agent frameworks, or tool-use patterns (e.g., MCP).
Familiarity with enterprise HCM, talent, or workforce management domains.
Experience working with developer portals, API catalogs, or self-serve onboarding tooling.
Background in multi-product or multi-tenant SaaS environments.
Interest in developer relations or technical writing, including contributing to docs, guides, or developer-facing content.
Cloud certifications (GKE, AWS Solutions Architect, etc.).

Responsibilities

Contribute to and execute on the technical strategy for the Workday Developer Portal and adjacent services, implementing platform capabilities that enable external developers and partners to build across Workday products.
Lead design and implementation of key platform components—including APIs, SDKs, and agentic service integrations—with a strong emphasis on scalability, reliability, and developer experience.
Collaborate closely with principal engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to translate platform growth goals into well-scoped, executable engineering work.
Uphold API governance and engineering best practices within your team, including versioning, backward compatibility, and security standards for public-facing surfaces.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing, and help raise the technical bar on the team.
Participate in architectural discussions and contribute to build-vs-integrate decisions for platform components, with grounding in real-world tradeoffs of scale and maintainability.
Support developer-facing documentation, onboarding flows, and tooling improvements that make the platform easier to adopt and extend.