P4 Sr Software Development Engineer
About The Position
Workday is seeking a senior individual-contributor engineer to design, build, optimize, and operate core platform services that power Workday at scale. The role focuses on high-performance backend engineering and distributed systems, with ownership of critical service design and implementation and responsibility for improving the operational health of those services. It also includes Site Reliability Engineering responsibilities as business needs require, including operational readiness, incident response, observability, performance tuning, capacity planning, and production support. The Core Services organization builds and supports the foundational technology behind Workday applications and platform products. Its distributed systems run across Workday data centers and public-cloud environments, handling mission-critical workloads and supporting scalability, reliability, and efficiency across the product landscape.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
- At least 8 years of professional software development experience writing clean, high-concurrency, production-grade code using Python, GoLang, Java, or C++.
- Experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or production operations.
- At least 4 years of experience designing, building, and evolving scalable distributed microservices architectures.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues, including memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks, and database or I/O serialization delays.
- Hands-on experience with profiling, tracing, and APM tools such as Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, pprof, or CloudWatch.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate effectively with platform, infrastructure, and product engineering teams.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, or ELK.
- Experience with CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins, Helm, Argo CD, Argo Workflows, or Kustomize.
- Experience supporting Java-based applications and build tools such as Maven or Gradle.
Responsibilities
- Improve CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and release automation to support fast, safe, repeatable delivery.
- Automate operational tasks and help development teams troubleshoot builds, deployments, runtime issues, and configuration problems.
- Design, build, and operate highly available platform capabilities across AWS, GCP, and Workday data centers.
- Deploy, scale, and optimize Docker- and Kubernetes-based workloads for availability, reliability, security, and resource efficiency.
- Lead technical design of core features and microservices that are decoupled, horizontally scalable, low latency, and high throughput.
- Write clean, production-ready code for critical paths and refactor legacy components for efficiency.
- Profile systems and analyze memory use and CPU utilization with APM tools to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
- Optimize data flow by designing caching strategies, improving database schemas and queries, and selecting efficient serialization formats.
- Partner with Cloud Infrastructure teams to align software design with AWS architecture and hybrid-cloud environments and optimize compute, memory, network efficiency, and reliability.
- Lead code reviews focused on architectural alignment, concurrency hazards, algorithmic efficiency, and production readiness.
- Mentor engineers in writing performance-focused, operable code.
- Establish automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows in CI/CD pipelines to detect performance regressions.
- Contribute to operational readiness, incident response, observability, capacity planning, and production support as needed.
Benefits
- May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission or bonus.
- May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
- Flexible work schedule, with at least 50% of time each quarter in the office or in the field, depending on role.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
