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 Capacity Engineering team within Workday's Performance, Resiliency, and Scalability organization is growing. We're dedicated to driving capacity engineering to meet the continuous scalability requirements of the Workday stack, ensuring our resiliency and reliability are continuously strengthened.
Our pivotal role means all Workday's critical services can scale to meet the rapid growth of our customers across both private and public clouds. This team is at the forefront of innovation, constantly evolving to scale the next generation of critical Workday services.
We foster an environment of open communication, mutual support, and continuous learning, where every member's contribution is valued and encouraged. We thrive on tackling challenges together and celebrating shared successes.
About the Role
As a Principal Technical Architect on the Capacity Engineering team, you'll be a pivotal leader, shaping the very foundation of Workday's scalability and reliability. You'll be responsible for designing and architecting cutting-edge frameworks for capacity engineering across Workday's core and shared services, ensuring our systems can seamlessly handle the demands of our rapidly growing customer base.
This role isn't just about design; it's about hands-on technical leadership and innovation. You'll delve deep into our distributed systems, identifying bottlenecks, defining robust capacity models, and pioneering solutions that push the boundaries of performance and resilience.
Key responsibilities will include:
- Architecting Scalable Frameworks: Design and implement architectural frameworks and tooling for proactive capacity planning, modeling, and management for critical Workday services.
- Technical Leadership & Guidance: Provide senior technical leadership, mentoring engineers, and guiding the team on best practices for building scalable, resilient, and performant distributed systems.
- System Analysis & Optimization: Conduct in-depth analysis of system performance, resource utilization, and growth patterns to identify optimization opportunities and predict future capacity needs.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with engineering teams, product management, and SREs to integrate capacity insights into the development lifecycle and influence product architecture.
- Innovation & Research: Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies, evaluating and recommending new approaches to continuously enhance Workday's scalability and operational efficiency.
This is a unique opportunity to make a profound impact on Workday's core infrastructure, directly influencing the experience of millions of users and ensuring our platform remains world-class in performance and reliability.
About You
You're an accomplished Principal Engineer or Technical Architect with extensive experience in designing, building, and scaling highly performant and resilient distributed systems. You thrive on tackling complex architectural challenges and possess a deep understanding of system & JVM internals, performance tuning, and capacity management in large-scale environments.
Basic Qualifications:
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant hands-on experience in system-level architecture, performance, resiliency, and scalability for complex distributed systems.
- 5+ experience in designing and implementing complex distributed system architectures, evidenced by successful deployment of systems with high availability (e.g., 99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance.
- 8+ years experience with at least two of the programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go), including experience in writing production-level code for distributed systems.
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline; a Master's degree (e.g., MS in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or related field) is strongly preferred or equivalent practical experience.
- Deep understanding, knowledge, and hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments, including advanced concepts like custom resource definitions, operators, and cluster optimization.
- Expertise in distributed computing principles, microservices architectures, and cloud-native patterns, specifically on leading public cloud platforms (AWS and GCP).
- Profound understanding of JVM internals (e.g., garbage collection, memory management, threading) and their impact on application performance and scalability.
- Proven ability to design and implement robust, scalable technical architectures and translate broad business requirements into clear, executable design specifications.
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with a track record of identifying root causes, proposing innovative solutions, and making data-driven architectural decisions.
- Demonstrated experience in technical leadership, including mentoring senior engineers, leading critical technical initiatives, and influencing architectural direction within an engineering organization.
Other Qualifications:
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong collaborative spirit, enjoying cross-functional teamwork, driving consensus, and fostering a shared understanding of technical goals.
- A continuous learning mindset, staying current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in cloud architecture, performance engineering, and system design.
- Experience with capacity planning, performance modeling, or cost optimization frameworks in a large-scale cloud environment.
You're passionate about building robust, scalable solutions and eager to make a significant impact on a mission-critical platform. If you're looking for an opportunity to lead, innovate, and shape the future of enterprise cloud applications, we encourage you to apply.
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 accommodations@workday.com.
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