Senior Software Engineer

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

1d•$160,100 - $285,100•Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer with a passion for architectural design and high-performance engineering. In this role, you will own the technical design and optimization of our core software platforms. You are a hands-on technical leader who can independently architect scalable systems, while simultaneously deep-diving into code-level profiling to eliminate latencies and resource bottlenecks. You will bridge the gap between application code and cloud infrastructure, ensuring our software is built from the ground up to be fast, lean, and resilient under production loads. The Core Services organization is responsible for the foundational technology that powers Workday’s applications and platform products. We design, build, and support a highly-performant distributed system that handles complex workloads at the scale required by the world’s largest organizations. Our infrastructure runs across both Workday data centers and public cloud environments, executing mission-critical business processes, functions, and integrations. The organization's scope spans from the Gateway to the persistence layer, delivering the scalability, reliability, and efficiency needed to support Workday’s rapidly evolving product landscape.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical work experience.
8+ years of professional software development experience writing clean, high-concurrency, and production-grade code utilizing Python, GoLang, or Java/C++.
4+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving scalable, distributed microservices architectures.
Proven track record of diagnosing and resolving complex performance issues, including memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks, and database/IO serialization delays.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with profiling, tracing, and APM tools (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, pprof, or CloudWatch) to analyze runtime application behavior.
Strong expertise in database optimization, including writing efficient SQL/NoSQL queries, indexing strategies, and designing multi-tier caching layers (e.g., Redis, Memcached).
Solid understanding of how application code interacts with cloud infrastructure (specifically AWS or GCP compute, memory, and networking boundaries).
Experience establishing micro-benchmarking, load testing, and stress testing practices (e.g., using Locust, JMeter, or k6) within CI/CD pipelines.
Deep understanding of asynchronous programming, multi-threading, memory management, and distributed systems concepts.
Demonstrated ability to drive design reviews, raise the bar for code quality through rigorous peer reviews, and mentor mid-level engineers on writing performance-first code.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a proven ability to collaborate effectively with platform, data, and product engineering teams.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design of core features and microservices, ensuring they are decoupled, horizontally scalable, and optimized for low-latency and high-throughput.
Act as a primary individual contributor, writing clean, production-ready code for critical paths and refactoring legacy components for maximum efficiency.
Conduct deep-dive profiling, memory footprint analysis, and CPU utilization reviews using APM tools to proactively find and fix bottlenecks before they impact production.
Own the efficiency of data flow, including designing caching strategies, optimizing database schemas/queries, and selecting efficient serialization formats.
Collaborate closely with the Cloud Infrastructure team to ensure the software design perfectly aligns with our AWS architecture, maximizing compute, memory, and network efficiency.
Drive rigorous code reviews, focusing heavily on architectural alignment, concurrency hazards, and algorithmic efficiency.
Mentoring other engineers on writing performance-first code.
Implement automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows within the CI/CD pipeline to catch performance regressions early.