Sr Software Engineer (Distributed Systems) - Extend Core Services

Your work days are brighter here.

At Workday, it all began with a conversation over breakfast. When our founders met at a sunny California diner, they came up with an idea to revolutionize the enterprise software market. And when we began to rise, one thing that really set us apart was our culture. A culture which was driven by our value of putting our people first. And ever since, the happiness, development, and contribution of every Workmate is central to who we are. Our Workmates believe a healthy employee-centric, collaborative culture is the essential mix of ingredients for success in business. That’s why we look after our people, communities and the planet while still being profitable. Feel encouraged to shine, however that manifests: you don’t need to hide who you are. You can feel the energy and the passion, it's what makes us unique. Inspired to make a brighter work day for all and transform with us to the next stage of our growth journey? Bring your brightest version of you and have a brighter work day here.

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About the Team

Workday Extend empowers our customers to expand the business capabilities of Workday by building on our existing technologies. The mission of our team is to establish the foundation for Workday Extend providing outstanding services such as Identity Management, Customer Onboarding and Provisioning services. This team builds critical backend services for Workday Extend including security components, inter-service control and communication components using open source and latest technologies.

We are proud of our forward-thinking, startup-like culture. We practice quick conceptualisation, agile development, extensive automated testing and continuous deployment. Every team is a proud service owner, responsible for development, quality and production support.

About the Role* Collaborate within a multidisciplinary Agile Scrum team to deliver core and business-critical features for Workday Extend with high quality and scalability.

• Design and develop robust and scalable back-end software using Scala, with a strong focus on performance, maintainability, and fault tolerance.
  
• Leverage cloud technologies (e.g., AWS, GCP) to architect, deploy, and manage services in a cloud-native environment, ensuring high availability and operational excellence.
  
• Take full service ownership including reliability, monitoring, on-call support, and incident response to ensure system health and resilience.
  
• Lead and contribute to complex system designs and architecture discussions, providing strategic input and ensuring alignment with business goals.
  
• Independently implement features and prototypes, including authoring detailed technical designs, documentation, and rollout strategies.
  
• Mentor and support junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and career development support.
  
• Drive the development of comprehensive test strategies, including unit, integration, end-to-end, and performance testing to ensure product stability.
  
• Champion continuous improvement through practices like continuous integration, deployment automation, and robust code review processes.
  
• Promote engineering best practices, coding standards, and DevOps methodologies to ensure sustainable and scalable development.
  
• Act as a technical leader in cross-functional collaboration, working with product managers, architects, and other teams to deliver cohesive solutions.
  
• Proactively identify and resolve technical and operational issues, contributing to a culture of accountability and engineering excellence.
  

About You

Basic Qualification

10+ years experience in software development engineering.

5+ years experience designing, developing, and deploying distributed systems.

5+ 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 dynamic programming, and hash-based data structures to design efficient and scalable solutions for problems such as fault tolerance, and data replication in large-scale systems.

• Solid experience in API Development, including REST and gRPC, with a focus on building scalable APIs for distributed services on AWS/GCP.
  
• Proficient in code testing methodologies, including unit, integration, and contract testing, using tools like JUnit, and Postman.
  
• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles, such as eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and leader election, with hands-on experience in Akka, and Kubernetes.
  
• Working knowledge of high availability and resiliency patterns, including load balancing, failover, and redundancy, deployed via AWS ALB/NLB, Auto Scaling Groups, and multi-AZ architectures.
  
• Familiar with scalable systems design, including horizontal scaling and distributed data management, optimized for cloud cost and performance.
  
• Strong in object-oriented design (OOD) and functional programming using Scala and Java, with focus on modular, testable components.
  
• Experienced with Git and collaborative workflows (e.g., GitFlow, trunk-based development) in a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or CodePipeline.
  
• Good understanding of cloud security practices, including IAM, authentication/authorization (OAuth2, JWT), TLS, and secrets management.
  
• Collaborative team player, skilled in agile development, code reviews, and cross-functional planning with distributed teams.
  
• Proficient in writing technical documentation, including API specs, architecture overviews, and deployment guides.
  

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.

Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!