Senior Software Development Engineer

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Platform organization is building the foundation for Workday’s open developer ecosystem—owning the full arc from scaffolding a service to knowing it’s healthy in production. The Observability team provides the tools and infrastructure that help developers understand the health, performance, and reliability of applications built on Workday’s Developer Platform. The product and experiences we build are designed for Workday customers, with the goal of giving them useful diagnostics, actionable production insights, and high-quality analytics for understanding their applications. We care deeply about technical craft and provide direct, constructive feedback. We value thoughtful design, collaborative problem-solving, and the reliability of the systems we build. If you enjoy distributed tracing, metrics, and helping developers understand complex systems, you will find a collaborative team that values rigor and makes the work enjoyable along the way. As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the Developer Platform Observability team, you will design and deliver scalable, secure, and developer-friendly observability capabilities. Your work will support customer-facing logging, metrics, tracing, system health, diagnostics, and analytics across Workday’s Developer Platform.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership and end-to-end delivery of backend services in production.
8+ years of experience in object-oriented programming with Java or a similar language, applying design patterns to build maintainable, performant services at scale.
5+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating microservice or event-driven architectures for large-scale distributed systems.
5+ years of experience with observability technologies such as Grafana Loki or Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Beats, Logstash, or OpenTelemetry, and the ability to use these tools to make complex systems understandable.
Bachelor's degree or higher, in Computer Science/Engineering or related technical field.
Demonstrated experience leading the design and delivery of backend services that expose APIs used by other teams or external clients, including end-to-end responsibility for observability (logging, metrics, and alerting).
Experience with cloud-native architectures and tooling (for example Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, Helm, or Envoy), including deploying and operating services in these environments.
Experience with AWS data and compute services such as Lambda, S3, Kinesis, Iceberg, Athena, or Glue, and how they fit into an observability or logging pipeline.
Experience building backend services using technologies such as Java , Kotlin , Golang , and RESTful APIs.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (for example CloudFormation or Terraform) to define and manage infrastructure in a repeatable way.
Experience influencing technical direction across teams and mentoring other engineers through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance.
Ability to simplify complex technical problems into scalable, practical implementations that balance reliability, performance, and developer experience.
Strong collaboration and communication skills, with experience working across functions and roles and contributing constructively in design discussions and reviews.
Demonstrated commitment to automated testing and code quality, including writing comprehensive tests to ensure the resilience of critical services.
Curiosity and creativity in solving problems and improving developer experience, with a mindset of reducing manual operational work through automation and self-service tools.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to agentic AI capabilities, including LLM-backed services, agent frameworks, or tool-use patterns such as Model Context Protocol.
Familiarity with enterprise HCM, talent, or workforce management domains.
Background in multi-product or multi-tenant SaaS environments.
Experience participating in or improving on-call and incident-response practices at scale.
Relevant cloud certifications such as GKE, AWS Solutions Architect, etc.

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain backend services and APIs that support customer observability and logging systems.
Apply algorithmic thinking and object-oriented design to create maintainable and performant solutions.
Write comprehensive automated tests and participate in code reviews to ensure quality and resiliency.
Identify and eliminate manual operational work by automating tasks and improving the self-service capabilities of our deployment platform.
Author and maintain clear, usable technical documentation for internal users and team members.
Collaborate with other specialists across the organization to understand use cases and deliver solutions that scale.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing, and help raise the technical bar on observability practices across the org.
Participate in architectural discussions and contribute to build-vs-integrate decisions for observability tooling, with grounding in real-world tradeoffs of cardinality, cost, and operational overhead.