Sr. Software Development Engineer / Principal, Software Development Engineer

Workday•Vancouver, BC

4d•CA$168,000 - CA$252,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer or Principal Software Development Engineer for their AI Model Serving team. This role involves technical leadership in shaping the vision and direction of the platform, making critical design decisions, driving team outcomes, and fostering an inclusive team culture. The team owns the services that power all production AI workloads, including vendor-hosted LLMs on GCP and AWS Bedrock, and operates the model deployment platform for Workday's models. The platform handles thousands of traditional ML models and approximately 2,000 requests per second, peaking at over 10,000. Key focus areas for the upcoming year include enhancing the uniform vendor interface, scaling the architecture, improving cost governance, exploring hosting open-source LLMs, evaluating performance gains through language rewrites, and adapting to the evolving AI landscape. The team culture is described as focused, high-performing, friendly, and dedicated, taking pride in operating a heavily used service at the heart of Workday's AI strategy. The role directly impacts Workday's ability to serve AI at scale, from traditional ML models to large language models powering Workday's agents.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
Deep experience designing, building, and scaling production-grade distributed systems.
Understanding of the full software development lifecycle — from coding standards and testing to code reviews, source control management, and deployment — and the ability to apply that knowledge to complex, high-throughput platforms.
Deep proficiency in Python, with extensive experience writing production-level code and building systems in Python-based frameworks.
Familiarity with both large language models and traditional machine learning models, including how they are served, scaled, and monitored in production environments.
Ability to design platform abstractions that serve both LLMs and traditional ML models effectively.
Ability to design and maintain monitoring strategies that provide clear insight into system health, performance, and cost.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear design documents, articulate complex technical ideas, and build consensus across teams.
A collaborative approach to engineering, with experience mentoring other engineers and fostering an inclusive team environment.

Nice To Haves

10+ years of related work experience in software development, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems. (for P5 Principal SDE)
6+ years of related work experience in software development, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems. (for P4 Sr. SDE)

Responsibilities

Lead the team technically by making critical design decisions that drive performance, reliability, and scalability across the platform.
Design, implement, and maintain large-scale systems that enable moving ML models to production.
Write design documents to build consensus for new system components and enhancements to existing components.
Evaluate and uptake new technologies made available within Workday and across the broader industry.
Troubleshoot, improve, and scale continuous integration software pipelines.
Develop relationships with software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists on partner teams.
Respond to alerts and debug production issues to maintain platform health and reliability.
Review pull requests and enforce consistency, performance, readability, and security across code bases.
Develop documentation to share knowledge with other engineers.
Help set the product vision for the AI Model Serving platform in partnership with the engineering manager, bringing a product-oriented mindset to infrastructure decisions.