P4 Sr Software Development Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

Workday is seeking a senior individual contributor to design, build, optimize, and operate core platform services. The role focuses on high-performance backend engineering and distributed systems, with responsibility for the reliability, scalability, latency, and production behavior of critical services. The engineer will own design and implementation work and help improve the operational health of the systems they build, including taking on Site Reliability Engineering responsibilities when business needs require it.

The position is part of Workday’s Core Services organization, which develops and supports the foundational technology behind Workday applications and platform products. Its distributed systems run in Workday data centers and public cloud environments and support mission-critical business processes, functions, and integrations. Workday’s flexible-work approach combines in-person and remote work, with at least half of each quarter spent in an office or in the field with customers, prospects, or partners, depending on the role.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of professional software development experience writing clean, high-concurrency, production-grade code using Python, Go, Java, or C++.
• Experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or production operations.
• At least 4 years of experience designing, building, and evolving scalable distributed microservices architectures.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues, including memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks, and database, I/O, or serialization delays.
• Hands-on experience with profiling, tracing, and APM tools to analyze runtime application behavior.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate effectively with platform, infrastructure, and product engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, or ELK.
• Experience with CI/CD and GitOps tools such as Jenkins, Helm, Argo CD, Argo Workflows, or Kustomize.
• Experience supporting Java-based applications and build tools such as Maven or Gradle.

Responsibilities

• Improve CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and release automation for fast, safe, repeatable delivery.
• Automate recurring operational tasks and troubleshoot builds, deployments, runtime issues, and configuration problems for development teams.
• Design, build, and operate highly available platform capabilities across AWS, GCP, and Workday data centers.
• Deploy, scale, and optimize containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes, emphasizing availability, reliability, security, and resource efficiency.
• Lead technical design of core features and microservices that are decoupled, horizontally scalable, low-latency, and high-throughput.
• Write clean, production-ready code for critical paths and refactor legacy components for efficiency.
• Profile systems and analyze memory footprint and CPU utilization with APM tools to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Own data-flow efficiency by designing caching strategies, optimizing database schemas and queries, and selecting efficient serialization formats.
• Partner with Cloud Infrastructure teams to align software design with AWS architecture and hybrid-cloud environments and improve compute, memory, network efficiency, and reliability.
• Lead rigorous code reviews focused on architectural alignment, concurrency risks, algorithmic efficiency, and production readiness.
• Mentor engineers in writing performance-focused, operable code.
• Establish automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows within CI/CD pipelines to catch performance regressions.
• Participate in operational readiness, incident response, observability, performance tuning, capacity planning, and production support as needed.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission or bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Flexible work arrangements, including remote work for designated home-office roles and the opportunity to work from offices for important occasions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior