Sr Software Development Engineer

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 Core Services organization is responsible for the foundational technology that powers Workday’s applications and platform products. We design, build, and support a highly-performant distributed system that handles complex workloads at the scale required by the world’s largest organizations. Our infrastructure runs across both Workday data centers and public cloud environments, executing mission-critical business processes, functions, and integrations. The organization's scope spans from the Gateway to the persistence layer, delivering the scalability, reliability, and efficiency needed to support Workday’s 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

Our Senior Software Engineers deliver core features and services while collaborating with multiple partners and mentoring team members. We use mainly Java and Scala, and are pursuing Senior Software Engineers who have deep experience in multi-threading, concurrency, and solving exciting distributed systems design problems! You will be involved in all aspects of software development, including designing, coding, testing, deploying, while providing support for our customer-facing software solutions. 

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and deliver enterprise grade solutions with robust unit tests and metrics

• Maintain continuous improvement within the team to ensure a high quality service

• Delivering quality features on-time and on-budget and implementing towards project plans and delivery commitments

• Handling the day-to-day development activities including participating in designs, design review, code review, and implementation 

• Mentor and learn from other team members through pairing, code reviews, knowledge shares, hackathons, etc.

• Collaborate with multi-functional teams to drive technical initiatives.

About You

Basic Qualifications(Required)

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related fields (or equivalent experience)

• 8+ years experience in software development engineering

• 4+ years experience designing, developing, and deploying distributed backend systems

• Fluency in Java or Scala, common design patterns with good grasp of distributed systems and ability to communicate design ideas effectively

• Expertise in dealing with horizontal scale, high availability, concurrency, profiling, deployment, upgrade/migration, production support and other SaaS enterprise software issues

• Proficient in major development tools and processes, such as source control, requirement spec, design and design review, unit test, system test, performance test, etc.

Other Qualifications:

• Experience collaborating with teammates to design, maintain and improve sophisticated object-oriented software following clean code standard methodology

• Understanding of Agile methodologies

• Demonstrated ability in Algorithmic Thinking, including design of efficient and scalable solutions for specific distributed backend database systems

• Solid experience with API Development, including understanding of API protocols like REST or gRPC and experience in designing and building distributed APIs

• Good understanding of Code Testing methodologies and experience with testing tools and frameworks in a distributed environment.

• Strong understanding of Distributed Systems Software principles, including data integrity for distributed operations and ACID consistency models and fault tolerance mechanisms

• Working knowledge of High Availability strategies like CAP Theorem and their implementation in distributed systems

• Experience with Large Scale Data Processing technologies and frameworks such as Spark or Kafka or Trino within a distributed architecture.

• Good understanding of Large Scale Systems design principles, and
Object-Oriented Design (OOD) principles and their application in building modular and maintainable distributed components.

• Basic understanding of System Security principles and best practices relevant to distributed environments, including specific security aspects like authentication or authorization and LDAP protocol

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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