Product Manager: Platform Enablement, Core Services

Workday Workday · Enterprise · Victoria, BC

Product Manager for Workday's Platform Enablement team, focusing on core infrastructure, developer tooling, and foundational services that support Workday's AI platform for managing people, money, and agents. The role involves defining roadmaps for infrastructure modernization, leading transitions from legacy systems to microservices, managing high-stakes workloads, defining SLOs, enhancing telemetry and automated testing, and advocating for machine-readable interfaces. The PM will leverage data to understand product usage and validate infrastructure investments.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner closely with senior engineering leads and architects to define the roadmap for core infrastructure, including the modernization of document transformation engines and UI orchestration layers.
  2. Lead the transition from legacy "background utilities" to a decoupled, microservices-based ecosystem. You will own the strategy for moving high-stakes workloads to modern, secure, and performant services.
  3. Act as the primary interface for high-priority external partners and internal application teams. You will negotiate requirements for high-capacity system demands (e.g., massive-scale exports) while protecting system stability and performance.
  4. Define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) focused on Availability, Throughput, and Saturation.
  5. Drive initiatives to enhance system telemetry and automated testing frameworks to catch regressions before they reach production.

Skills

Required

  • 4+ years of experience in product management, engineering, or an equivalent, with experience building and maintaining complex backend solutions or infrastructure platforms.
  • 4+ years of experience collaborating deeply with engineering teams to deliver high-scale, market-leading functionality.
  • Demonstrated ability to understand complex backend architectures, APIs, and the nuances of distributed systems.
  • Experience managing the migration or deprecation of legacy technologies in favor of modern cloud-native solutions
  • Excellent ability to articulate technical concepts and infrastructure trade-offs to diverse audiences, from engineers to executive partners.
  • Familiarity with observability tools, error messaging systems, and performance testing frameworks used to diagnose issues in complicated services.
  • A track record of making informed, data-driven decisions in ambiguous situations and a desire to bring engineering teams along on the strategic journey.
  • Experience conducting research to gather and analyze information, leading to a deeper understanding of complex problems and the formulation of effective solutions.
  • A strong background in partner management, including identifying key team members, understanding their needs, and developing effective communication and management strategies.
  • Demonstrated ability in critical thinking, with experience identifying market opportunities and developing long-term product strategies amongst a technical landscape to achieve a competitive advantage.
  • Exceptional skills in decision making, including the ability to apply various decision-making frameworks, assess risk, and balance intuition with logical reasoning.
  • Excellent communication and presentation abilities.
  • A collaborative and eager-to-learn mentality.

Nice to have

  • Experience with AI technologies and their application in software development and/or UI delivery.

What the JD emphasized

  • core infrastructure
  • modernization
  • legacy systems
  • microservices-based ecosystem
  • high-stakes workloads
  • modern, secure, and performant services
  • high-capacity system demands
  • system stability and performance
  • Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
  • automated testing frameworks
  • machine-readable interfaces
  • deterministic APIs
  • data-driven decisions
  • complex backend architectures
  • distributed systems
  • migration or deprecation of legacy technologies
  • cloud-native solutions