Software Development Engineer

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a Software Development Engineer to join the Developer Platform team, specifically the UI and Tooling Server team. This team is responsible for providing the tools and services that make the Workday platform open, extensible, and AI-native. The role involves owning both the build-time authoring experience and the runtime UI experience for applications built on Workday. The team's micro-services handle massive traffic globally, demanding high availability, low latency, and compliance. Stability, reliability, and resiliency are core to their operations. The team emphasizes developer experience, operational excellence, and leveraging AI to reduce friction in both product development and the development process itself. The engineer will own services end-to-end, tackle complex distributed systems problems, and contribute to the evolution of Workday's open platform.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of software engineering with a strong focus on backend microservice architectures and distributed systems.
5+ years of experience in programming: Java or Kotlin, with production Spring Boot experience.
5+ years of experience in cloud platforms: AWS (preferred), GCP, or Azure.
5+ years of experience in containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes.
3+ years operating production services you own — including observability (metrics, logging, tracing), SLO-based alerting, and on-call.
Hands-on experience with AI-augmented development (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot), including the ability to direct, review, and validate agent-generated code.

Nice To Haves

Go is a plus.
Deep backend proficiency in Java or Kotlin, with strong command of design patterns, distributed systems, and high-availability architecture.
A reliability mindset: you have designed for failure, capacity, and graceful degradation on services that carry real production traffic.
Expert API development and contract management, including versioning, backward compatibility, and familiarity with modern protocols (e.g., MCP) to support a spec-driven development approach.
Service ownership: end-to-end accountability for operational health, test automation, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native observability.
Hands-on experience integrating AI capabilities into software products, not only using AI tools to write code.
1+ years of experience building modern frontend UIs (e.g., React, Angular, or Vue), sufficient to own a feature from API through UI.
Strong collaborator and communicator — able to partner with PMs, designers, and engineers to break work down and clearly articulate technical tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience with developer platforms, DevTools, language servers, or other core engineering platforms is a plus.

Responsibilities

Design and deliver backend microservices and developer-facing UI features end to end, taking ownership from technical design through production rollout and ongoing operational health.
Build and evolve well-governed public and internal APIs, applying versioning, backward compatibility, and security standards to surfaces that external developers depend on.
Operate what you build in a cloud-native environment — instrumenting services with metrics, logging, and SLO-based alerting, and participating in on-call to keep a multi-cluster fleet healthy.
Integrate AI and agentic capabilities into the platform, including large language model integrations, real-time streaming interfaces, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) based tooling.
Use AI-augmented development tools as a daily part of your workflow, and help establish team practices for directing, reviewing, and validating agent-generated code.
Partner with product managers, designers, and engineers across teams to break ambiguous requirements into well-scoped, executable work, and clearly articulate technical tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Raise the technical bar through code review, design feedback, pairing, and strong test automation, and write clear technical documentation for the features you own.