Principal Product Manager - Observability - Logs & Traces

Workday Workday · Enterprise · Dublin, Ireland

Workday is seeking a Principal Product Manager to manage their observability platform, focusing on logs and traces. This role involves understanding observability needs, driving product vision and roadmap for data collection, processing, querying, and visualization, and collaborating with engineering, SRE, and operations teams to ensure quality delivery of SaaS infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting tools. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in product management for SaaS infrastructure or developer tooling, deep familiarity with observability concepts, and a strong ability to influence stakeholders and drive cross-team collaboration.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner with engineering, SRE, and operations teams across Workday to deeply understand their observability needs — what they must monitor, how they troubleshoot, and where visibility gaps slow them down.
  2. Drive the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for the observability platform, spanning data collection, processing, querying, and visualisation capabilities.
  3. Shape solution design for each release, balancing user requirements, technical architecture, and the operational reliability demands of a global SaaS platform.
  4. Work hand-in-hand with platform engineering teams through design, development, testing, and release to ensure quality delivery on time and at scale.
  5. Coordinate and align delivery across multiple scrum teams building in a complex, distributed systems environment.

Skills

Required

  • Product management experience
  • SaaS or cloud-based infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling product delivery
  • Observability concepts (metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs)
  • Data pipeline experience (collection, processing, storage, querying, visualization of high-volume operational data)
  • Influencing engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders
  • Cross-team collaboration (platform engineering, SRE, infrastructure, application development)
  • Customer empathy for internal developer and operator personas
  • Using quantitative data for prioritization and impact measurement
  • Making sound product decisions balancing developer experience, technical feasibility, operational reliability, and architectural direction
  • Understanding of observability and monitoring landscape (open-source ecosystems, commercial platforms)
  • Defining and executing research strategies (user interviews, dogfooding, surveys, usage analysis)
  • Communicating platform strategy to senior engineering leadership
  • Strategic thinking connecting platform capabilities to business outcomes

Nice to have

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline
  • Master's degree or equivalent practical experience

What the JD emphasized

  • 12+ years of experience in product management, defining and delivering SaaS or cloud-based infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling products at scale.
  • Deep familiarity with observability concepts — metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and SLOs — and how engineering teams use them to operate reliable systems at scale.
  • Proven ability to influence engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders without authority, driving alignment on platform strategy and investment priorities across a large engineering organisation.