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
This is an opportunity to be part of a growth team focused on MLOps. We build ML capabilities into our products, and you would be building part of the next generation of Workday technology. We believe predictive products can be as ground-breaking to the next generation of technology as mobile was to the last.
As a Principal Software Engineer you will help develop ML-powered features and experiences for every user across our HR & Talent product portfolio. You will work closely with ML engineers and other software teams to deliver critically important infrastructure and software frameworks that enable machine learning across Workday’s product ecosystem. You will apply modern MLOps, CloudOps, and data engineering stacks to enable development, training, deployment, and lifecycle management of a variety of ML capabilities; supervised and unsupervised, deep learning and classical. You will be responsible for the design & development of new APIs/microservices and deploy them using Python, Go, Terraform, and Kubernetes at scale.
You will use Workday’s vast computing resources on rich, exclusive datasets to deliver value that transforms the way our end-users experience WD. We will challenge you to apply your best creative thinking, analysis, problem-solving, and technical abilities to make an impact on thousands of enterprises and millions of people.
About the Role
Architect Distributed Systems: Lead the design and implementation of high-throughput microservices and APIs (Python/Go) that serve as the backbone for Workday’s ML ecosystem.
Engineer the Platform: Build and optimize a unified ML development experience using Kubeflow, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), and specialized compute orchestration (CPUs/GPUs).
Scale Cloud Infrastructure: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of cloud-based services, utilizing Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to build resilient, self-healing environments.
Drive Engineering Excellence: Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, and technology evaluations to ensure our systems meet 99.99% reliability standards.
Support Agentic AI: Design the architectural patterns and observability frameworks required to support emerging Agentic AI systems and LLM-based applications.
Collaborate as a Technical Lead: Partner with data scientists, ML engineers, and architects to translate complex data needs into elegant, maintainable software solutions.
Innovate & Prototype: Research and drive adoption of new infrastructure tools with a focus on reliability, security, and enterprise-grade scale.
About You
Basic Qualifications for Principal Software Engineer
- 6 or more years of validated industry experience.
- Bachelor’s and/or Master’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.
- Strong software engineering experience with designing and building scalable, distributed systems.
- Deep understanding of cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems; experience with AWS and GCP.
- Experience developing microservices, APIs, robust cloud service, large-scale web applications, managing CI/CD workflows.
- Proficiency with Python, Go, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
- Experience running and maintaining Kubernetes clusters in production.
- Ensure security and compliance of cloud platforms, implementing best practices for encryption, data protection, and access control.
Other Qualifications
- Experience with large-scale ML data pipelines and data lakes.
- Ability to think across layers of the ML stack, from infrastructure to model deployment.
- Experience developing monitoring and alerting systems for ML infrastructure.
- Understanding of agentic AI concepts; experience with LangChain and LangSmith is preferred.
- Proven leadership or mentoring experience.
**Workday Pay Transparency Statement **
The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.
Primary Location: CAN.ON.Toronto
Primary CAN Base Pay Range: $168,000 - $252,000 CAD
Additional CAN Location(s) Base Pay Range: $168,000 - $252,000 CAD
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.
Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.
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.
Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!
At Workday, we value our candidates’ privacy and data security. Workday will never ask candidates to apply to jobs through websites that are not Workday Careers.
Please be aware of sites that may ask for you to input your data in connection with a job posting that appears to be from Workday but is not.
In addition, Workday will never ask candidates to pay a recruiting fee, or pay for consulting or coaching services, in order to apply for a job at Workday.