Senior Software Development Engineer

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 Platform organization is building the foundation for Workday’s open developer ecosystem—owning the full arc from scaffolding a service to knowing it’s healthy in production. The Observability team provides the tools and infrastructure that help developers understand the health, performance, and reliability of applications built on Workday’s Developer Platform. The product and experiences we build are designed for Workday customers, with the goal of giving them useful diagnostics, actionable production insights, and high-quality analytics for understanding their applications.

We care deeply about technical craft and provide direct, constructive feedback. We value thoughtful design, collaborative problem-solving, and the reliability of the systems we build. If you enjoy distributed tracing, metrics, and helping developers understand complex systems, you will find a collaborative team that values rigor and makes the work enjoyable along the way.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the Developer Platform Observability team, you will design and deliver scalable, secure, and developer-friendly observability capabilities. Your work will support customer-facing logging, metrics, tracing, system health, diagnostics, and analytics across Workday’s Developer Platform.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and maintain backend services and APIs that support customer observability and logging systems.

• Apply algorithmic thinking and object-oriented design to create maintainable and performant solutions.

• Write comprehensive automated tests and participate in code reviews to ensure quality and resiliency.

• Identify and eliminate manual operational work by automating tasks and improving the self-service capabilities of our deployment platform.

• Author and maintain clear, usable technical documentation for internal users and team members.

• Collaborate with other specialists across the organization to understand use cases and deliver solutions that scale.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing, and help raise the technical bar on observability practices across the org.

• Participate in architectural discussions and contribute to build-vs-integrate decisions for observability tooling, with grounding in real-world tradeoffs of cardinality, cost, and operational overhead.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including ownership and end-to-end delivery of backend services in production.

• 8+ years of experience in object-oriented programming with Java or a similar language, applying design patterns to build maintainable, performant services at scale.

• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing and operating microservice or event-driven architectures for large-scale distributed systems.

• 5+ years of experience with observability technologies such as Grafana Loki or Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Beats, Logstash, or OpenTelemetry, and the ability to use these tools to make complex systems understandable.

• Bachelor's degree or higher, in Computer Science/Engineering or related technical field.

Other Qualifications