Sr Software Development Engineer - Distributed Systems

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

2d•$160,100 - $285,100•Hybrid

About The Position

Your work days are brighter here. We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. In return, we’ll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too. About the Team The OMS Data Lake team is a critical component of the Workday Data Cloud platform. Our mission is foundational to Workday's enterprise strategy, directly supporting the Open Platform initiative. We build the core next-generation infrastructure that decouples storage and compute, eliminating traditional data silos and enabling seamless, secure, ecosystem-wide data access. By engineering high-throughput distributed platform services, we transform how massive enterprise datasets are managed, shared, and queried across the industry. About the Role In this role, you will be architecting, building, and delivering the platform capabilities and services that power our Apache Iceberg zero-copy data lake solution. You will work on unlocking and unifying real-time and analytical data from Workday’s core operational business applications—including Human Capital Management (HCM), Financial Management, Recruiting, and more—without costly data duplication or heavy ETL overhead. You will focus on building robust, high-performance services that expose transactional application engine data as optimized Iceberg tables, ensuring strict consistency, advanced metadata management, schema evolution, and multi-cloud data accessibility for both internal analytical engines and external third-party consumers.

Requirements

Programming Languages: Java (Primary), Scala, or Python
Data & Storage Engines: Apache Iceberg, Apache Spark, Large-scale Database Internals (Relational, NoSQL, and Columnar Engine Concepts)
Distributed Systems: Distributed Processing, Query Execution/Optimization, Storage-Compute Separation, High-Throughput Service Mesh
Cloud Infrastructure: Multi-Cloud Managed Services: Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
8+ years of deep experience in Software Engineering, Big Data Platform Architecture, Distributed Systems, or a related technical field.
5+ years of production-level experience designing and implementing highly concurrent software using Java.
Proven expertise with large-scale data processing frameworks like Apache Spark or Trino, and modern open table formats such as Apache Iceberg and Parquet.
Strong working knowledge of deploying, tuning, and maintaining data services within cloud-managed ecosystems across AWS and GCP.

Nice To Haves

BSc, MSc, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent technical field.
Deep foundational understanding of database technologies, transaction processing (ACID properties), query execution plans, and file formats.
Exposure to operating system concepts including memory and storage management, threading, concurrency control, and networking.
Proficient in designing and maintaining sophisticated object-oriented software following clean code principles and API design.
Experience with production resiliency, monitoring, and debugging massive data platform infrastructure (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana).

Responsibilities

Architecting, building, and delivering platform capabilities and services that power our Apache Iceberg zero-copy data lake solution.
Unlocking and unifying real-time and analytical data from Workday’s core operational business applications—including Human Capital Management (HCM), Financial Management, Recruiting, and more—without costly data duplication or heavy ETL overhead.
Building robust, high-performance services that expose transactional application engine data as optimized Iceberg tables, ensuring strict consistency, advanced metadata management, schema evolution, and multi-cloud data accessibility for both internal analytical engines and external third-party consumers.