Backend Engineer - Sana Agents

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

About Sana
Sana is an AI lab building superintelligence for work. We believe organizations can accomplish their missions faster when teams can effortlessly access knowledge, automate repetitive work, and learn anything with the help of agentic AI. As part of Workday, we are committed to building AI that augments people - not replaces them.

We bring this mission to life through two products. Sana Agents provide a seamless way to access all your company’s apps, knowledge, and data, enabling AI agents to do real work so teams can process and act on information at unprecedented scale. Sana Learn is an AI-powered learning hub that combines the simplicity of a modern learning platform with intelligent features like an AI tutor, automated content generation, and interactive apps, making knowledge not just accessible but actionable.

We’re a talent-dense, product-obsessed team of engineers and designers from companies like Google, Spotify, Apple, and Databricks, united by deep technical excellence and rapid iteration. Our tools already help over a million people learn and work better across hundreds of leading enterprises - and we’re just getting started.

About the Role

About the role

You'll build and evolve the core services that power agents and product features, with a focus on enterprise-scale workloads, performance optimization, and long-term architectural sustainability. You drive architecture and systems design to ensure our platform can support high volumes of data, entities, and demanding enterprise clients.

In this role, you will

• Design and decompose services and APIs for scale and clarity

• Build eventing and queue systems for reliable, high-throughput data flows

• Lead schema evolution, migrations, query/index optimization and caching strategies

• Define and enforce consistency models and multi-region readiness

• Optimize for performance budgets and privacy/tenant isolation

• Work hands-on with TypeScript/Node, Postgres, and distributed systems primitives.

What success looks like

• Core services are reliable, scalable, and easy to evolve

• Risks are identified and solved before issues become critical

• APIs are clear, well-documented, and power seamless product experiences

• Data boundaries are robust - privacy and tenant isolation are never compromised

• Performance budgets are met, even under heavy load

• You are a trusted partner for distributed systems design and implementation

Our tech stack

We build on a simple modern stack optimized for both humans and AI.

• Backend: TypeScript, Kotlin, Node.js

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Tailwind

• Databases: Postgres, Redis

• Cloud infra: GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform

About You

Basic Qualification 

8+ years experience in software development engineering.
4+ years experience designing, developing, and deploying distributed systems.
[Insert years] experience designing and developing distributed system components, demonstrating knowledge of principles such as consistency, availability, and fault tolerance.
Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualification

Demonstrated ability in Algorithmic Thinking, including [insert specific algorithms or data structures relevant to distributed systems], to design efficient and scalable solutions for [insert specific distributed computing problems].
Solid experience with API Development, including understanding of [insert specific API protocols like REST or gRPC] and experience in designing and building [insert specific types of distributed APIs].
Good understanding of Code Testing methodologies, such as [insert specific testing types like integration or contract testing], and experience with [insert specific testing tools or frameworks] in a distributed environment.
Strong understanding of Distributed Systems Software principles, including [insert specific concepts like consistency models or fault tolerance mechanisms], and experience in [insert specific distributed technologies or frameworks].
Working knowledge of High Availability strategies and their implementation in distributed systems, including [insert specific techniques like load balancing or redundancy].
Experience with Large Scale Data Processing technologies and frameworks such as [insert specific tools like Spark or Kafka] within a distributed architecture.
Good understanding of Large Scale Systems design principles, including [insert specific aspects like scalability or data management in distributed contexts].
Good understanding of Object-Oriented Design (OOD) principles and their application in building modular and maintainable distributed components.
Working experience with Source Control Management (SCM) tools such as [insert specific SCM tools] and branching strategies for collaborative distributed development.
Basic understanding of System Security principles and best practices relevant to distributed environments, including [insert specific security aspects like authentication or authorization].
Proven ability in Team Collaboration within a distributed software development team.
Good skills in creating Technical Writing Documentation for [insert specific types of technical documentation] related to distributed systems.

Our Approach to Flexible Work
 

With Flex Work, we’re 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 you'll 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.

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 [email protected].

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