Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

About Workday

Workday is a Fortune 500 company and a leading platform leveraging AI to manage personnel, finances, and agents. We are dedicated to transforming the future of work by enabling teams to focus on what truly matters. Our culture emphasizes integrity, empathy, and enthusiasm, supporting one another to tackle complex challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We invest in our employees' growth by offering trust, development tools, and long-term support.

Team Overview

This position is within the infrastructure engineering team of Workday's observability organization. Our platform is trusted globally by engineering teams to monitor and operate production systems. We focus on the entire metrics ingestion and alerting pipeline, from data collection and processing to issue detection and notification delivery. Our approach involves building scalable distributed systems worldwide prioritizing reliability and maintainability. Additionally, we advance "agentic engineering" by creating tools and interfaces that aid engineers and AI agents in platform operations.

Role Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and troubleshoot distributed systems operating in cloud-native production environments.
• Create platform services for large-scale metrics ingestion, processing, and alerting.
• Design and enhance APIs, tooling, and workflows to facilitate AI agents' interaction with the observability infrastructure.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver robust, observable, and user-friendly infrastructure.

Candidate Profile

• Minimum 6 years of experience in professional software engineering with production systems.
• At least 4 years designing and managing large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including concurrency, fault tolerance, high availability, and failure analysis.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience or keen interest in agentic engineering, such as building MCP servers or agent-facing APIs and tooling supporting complex platform operations.
• Hands-on with Prometheus-like monitoring ecosystems, time-series data pipelines, or large-scale observability platforms.
• Strong skills in Go for backend services and Python for automation, tooling, data processing, or machine learning tasks.
• Expertise designing scalable HTTP and gRPC APIs in multi-tenant environments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes deployment and operations, utilizing infrastructure-as-code tools like Helm, Jsonnet, Terraform, or GitOps workflows.
• Adherence to rigorous testing practices including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for distributed systems.
• Proven ability to take full ownership of technical issues, work collaboratively with Site Reliability Engineers and engineering partners, and provide mentorship.
• Excellent communication skills for documenting architecture, operational procedures, and technical content.

Compensation and Work Flexibility

In Ireland, the base salary range for this role is €96,000 to €144,000 annually, depending on experience and skills. Additional compensation may include bonuses and stock refresh grants. Workday supports flexible work arrangements, balancing in-person collaboration and remote work, expecting employees to spend at least 50% of each quarter engaging with colleagues in person or in the field. Remote employees have periodic in-office opportunities for key events.

Equal Opportunity & Accommodations

Workday is committed to equal employment opportunities including for individuals with disabilities and protected veterans. Reasonable accommodations are provided during the hiring process and employment as required. We maintain a strict policy against retaliation related to accommodation requests or policy reporting. Candidates may request accommodations by contacting the company in advance.

Candidate Privacy and Security

Workday prioritizes applicants’ data security and privacy. We only accept applications through authorized career platforms. We do not charge any fees or require payments for job applications, recruitment, or coaching.