Senior Software Engineer(Distributed Systems)

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

8h • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Software Engineer will build and operate a scalable data-product platform that enables engineering and analytics teams to create and govern production data products and marts. The platform spans the data-product lifecycle, including dbt Core, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3 Tables, AWS Glue Catalog, access control, security, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.

This hands-on role combines data platform engineering with data-product development. The engineer will build reusable platform capabilities and create and maintain production dbt projects, data models, tests, semantic definitions, and data marts. The work involves highly performant analytical SQL and supporting teams in using visualization tools such as Apache Superset or Metabase, while addressing high-volume data, distributed query processing, data modeling, data quality, reliability, governance, security, and developer experience.

The Data Platform and Observability Engineering team builds platforms that help Workday teams turn data into reliable, governed products. Its work spans distributed systems, analytics engineering, and platform operations, and includes compute, storage, catalog, orchestration, access control, and development and operations workflows for data products and marts. The team works with domain engineering, analytics, security, and infrastructure partners, treating the platform as a product with reusable capabilities and clear contracts.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering or data engineering experience.
• At least 5 years of experience building or operating production data platforms, lakehouse platforms, or distributed data systems.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining production dbt Core projects.
• Strong production SQL and data-modeling experience.
• Experience with Airflow or another production workflow orchestration platform.
• Experience with Trino or another distributed SQL/query engine.
• Experience with a lakehouse technology such as Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, or Hudi.
• Experience with cloud object storage and metadata/catalog systems.
• Experience with Python, Java, Go, Scala, or another production programming language.
• Experience with infrastructure as code such as Terraform.
• Experience working with production data access controls and security.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong production dbt experience, including project architecture, macros, packages, tests, and large model graphs.
• Experience with data modeling, marts, data quality, and semantic/metrics definitions across multiple domains.
• Strong Trino experience, including query execution and performance tuning.
• Hands-on Apache Iceberg experience, including partitioning, schema evolution, snapshots, and table maintenance.
• Strong understanding of query and data-layout optimization for high-volume workloads.
• Experience with Terraform, IAM, least privilege, encryption, CI/CD, monitoring, and production operations.
• Experience operating reliable, multi-tenant data platforms.

Nice To Haves

• A Master’s degree in a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience building or operating multi-team data/lakehouse platforms.
• Experience with reusable platform patterns across project structure, orchestration, catalog, CI/CD, and environments.
• Experience with S3 Tables, Glue Catalog, or comparable lakehouse storage/catalog technologies.
• Experience with Apache Superset, Metabase, or similar BI platforms.
• Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, or similar distributed technologies.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve platform capabilities across dbt, Airflow, Trino, Iceberg/S3 Tables, Glue Catalog, security, and infrastructure.
• Create and maintain production dbt projects end-to-end, including data models, transformations, tests, documentation, and semantic definitions.
• Design and operate Airflow workflows, including scheduling, dependencies, retries, backfills, and recovery.
• Develop and optimize high-volume analytical workloads on Trino and Iceberg, including partitioning, incremental processing, file layout, and query performance.
• Implement data quality, access control, and security using governed catalog and IAM patterns.
• Use Terraform and CI/CD to automate platform and data-product deployment.
• Contribute to the semantic and visualization layer for data-product consumption.
• Troubleshoot and operate the full stack, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and safe production operations.
• Build reusable platform patterns that make it easier for teams to develop and operate data products.
• Support and mentor team members on data platform and data-product development.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Comprehensive benefits are referenced, but specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior