Senior Software Engineer
Pleasanton, CA - USA
Job Summary
Your work days are brighter here.
Were 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 were shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join youll 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. Were 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 youre building smarter solutions supporting customers or creating a space where everyone belongs youll do meaningful work with Workmates whove got your return well 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 youve found a match in Workday and we hope to be a match for you too.
About the Team
Workday founded in 2005 stands as a groundbreaking force in the human capital and financial management industry with a global presence and a diverse array of customers. Across our offices worldwide our teams are united by a shared dedication to innovation collaboration and excellence!The Core Services organization is responsible for the foundational technology that powers Workdays applications and platform products. We design build and support a highly-performant distributed system that handles complex workloads at the scale required by the worlds largest organizations. Our infrastructure runs across both Workday data centers and public cloud environments executing mission-critical business processes functions and integrations. The organizations scope spans from the Gateway to the persistence layer delivering the scalability reliability and efficiency needed to support Workdays rapidly evolving product landscape.
Joining our team means embarking on a journey of opportunity to advance your career and contribute to impactful solutions that shape industries. Whether you thrive with solving sophisticated business problems collaborating with agile teams or championing innovation and software design Workday offers an environment where your talents can thrive.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer with a passion for architectural design and high-performance this role you will own the technical design and optimization of our core software platforms. You are a hands-on technical leader who can independently architect scalable systems while simultaneously deep-diving into code-level profiling to eliminate latencies and resource bottlenecks. You will bridge the gap between application code and cloud infrastructure ensuring our software is built from the ground up to be fast lean and resilient under production loads.
What you will do
Design and Architect High-Performance Services: Lead the technical design of core features and microservices ensuring they are decoupled horizontally scalable and optimized for low-latency and high-throughput.
Write Core Highly Efficient Code: Act as a primary individual contributor writing clean production-ready code for critical paths and refactoring legacy components for maximum efficiency.
Diagnose and Resolve Performance Bottlenecks: Conduct deep-dive profiling memory footprint analysis and CPU utilization reviews using APM tools to proactively find and fix bottlenecks before they impact production.
Optimize the Data Layer: Own the efficiency of data flow including designing caching strategies optimizing database schemas/queries and selecting efficient serialization formats.
Partner with Infrastructure Teams: Collaborate closely with the Cloud Infrastructure team to ensure the software design perfectly aligns with our AWS architecture maximizing compute memory and network efficiency.
Raise the Technical Bar: Drive rigorous code reviews focusing heavily on architectural alignment concurrency hazards and algorithmic efficiency. Mentoring other engineers on writing performance-first code.
Establish Benchmarking and Load Testing: Implement automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows within the CI/CD pipeline to catch performance regressions early.
About You
Basic Qualifications (Required)
Education: Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or equivalent practical work experience.
Core Development: 8 years of professional software development experience writing clean high-concurrency and production-grade code utilizing Python GoLang or Java/C.
System Architecture: 4 years of experience designing building and evolving scalable distributed microservices architectures.
Performance Engineering: Proven track record of diagnosing and resolving complex performance issues including memory leaks CPU bottlenecks and database/IO serialization delays.
Profiling & APM Tools: Hands-on experience with profiling tracing and APM tools (e.g. Datadog New Relic OpenTelemetry pprof or CloudWatch) to analyze runtime application behavior.
Data Layer Optimization: Strong expertise in database optimization including writing efficient SQL/NoSQL queries indexing strategies and designing multi-tier caching layers (e.g. Redis Memcached).
Other Qualifications (Preferred)
Cloud & Infrastructure Awareness: Solid understanding of how application code interacts with cloud infrastructure (specifically AWS or GCP compute memory and networking boundaries).
Testing & Benchmarking: Experience establishing micro-benchmarking load testing and stress testing practices (e.g. using Locust JMeter or k6) within CI/CD pipelines.
Concurrency & Parallelism: Deep understanding of asynchronous programming multi-threading memory management and distributed systems concepts.
Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to drive design reviews raise the bar for code quality through rigorous peer reviews and mentor mid-level engineers on writing performance-first code.
Collaboration: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proven ability to collaborate effectively with platform data and product engineering teams.
Workday Pay Transparency Statement
The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidates compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including but not limited to geography experience skills job duties and business need among other things. For more information regarding Workdays comprehensive benefits please click here.
Primary Location:
Our Approach to Flexible Work
With Flex Work were combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections maintain a strong community and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways so rather than a number of required days in-office each week we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers prospects and partners (depending on role). This means youll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business team and personal needs while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote home office roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.
Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.
At Workday we are committed to providing an accessible and inclusive hiring experience where all candidates can fully demonstrate their skills. If you require assistance or an accommodation at any point please email .
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Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
Seamlessly manage your people, money, and agents on an open, unified platform with AI at the core. It’s a new work day.