Sr. Principal Architect - Observability

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Data Platform and Observability Engineering team empowers our customers and workmates with resilient, secure, massively scalable distributed systems, real-time observability, and operational analytics — enabling product innovation, faster problem resolution, seamless operations and data driven decisions. Our focus is on the development of large scale distributed data systems to support critical Workday products and provide real-time insights across Workday’s platforms, infrastructure and applications. The team provides platforms that process Petabytes of data that enable core Workday products and use cases like core HCM, Fins, AI/ML skus, internal data products and Observability. If you enjoy writing efficient software or tuning and scaling large distributed systems you will enjoy working with us. Do you want to tackle exciting challenges at massive scale across private and public clouds for our 10000+ global customers? Do you want to work with world class engineers and facilitate the development of the next generation Distributed systems platforms? If so, we should chat. This is a hands-on role, where you will be responsible for the architecture, standards, best practices for all things Observability at Workday. You will spend your time by working closely with the Observability Platform engineers, product managers, stakeholders, evolving the platform architecture, contributing to the Observability platform and acting as an evangelist for the platform.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
Must have at least 10+ years of software engineering/architect background and a proven track record of delivering high quality products at massive scale
Ideal candidate has 10+ years' experience writing high quality code (Java/Scala/Go/Python) and be able to design systems that meet the business needs.
You have hands-on expertise in Observability platforms like Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger/Zipkin etc.

Nice To Haves

Extensive experience with data collection agents, loggers, and visualizing and correlating data sets from multiple domains.
Expertise in LLM orchestration framework(LangChain etc,), Observability for AI Agents(Latency, quality, online/offline evals, Track multi-turn conversations, tool/agent invocations etc)
Experience building Observability agents that help with Triage, Root Cause Analysis using open standards like Skills, MCPs and popular orchestration frameworks like LangChain etc.
You have deployed Observability across the OSI stack.
Expertise in low-latency/high throughput data processing capabilities a big plus.
Open Source contributions to popular O11y frameworks & platforms are a big plus.
Outstanding presentation skills to both technical and executive audiences.
You have strong communication skills both written and verbal.

Responsibilities

Provide architectural leadership for Workday’s Observability Platform and Services.
Be the domain expert across all the pillars of Observability.
Drive Agentic experiences for incident detection, triage, and recovery - by owning & driving the Observability MCP and Observability Agents.
Ensure a seamless Observability experience across data domains (logs, metrics, traces, alerts) and different infrastructure types (Virtualized, Kubernetes, Bare metal, etc.)
Drive standardization of the Observability tooling, develop and publish standards, leverage open source specifications (OpenTelemetry etc)
Closely collaborate with the Infrastructure, Technology Operations & Product teams.
Promote & Evangelize Observability to all Workday engineering teams.
Establish standard processes, frameworks, and help onboard engineering teams.