Senior Software Engineer
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About the role
Workday, founded in 2005, stands as a groundbreaking force in the human capital and financial management industry, with a global presence and a diverse array of customers. Across our offices worldwide, our teams are united by a shared dedication to innovation, collaboration, and excellence! The Core Services organization is responsible for the foundational technology that powers Workday's applications and platform products. We design, build, and support a highly-performant distributed system that handles complex workloads at the scale required by the world's largest organizations. Our infrastructure runs across both Workday data centers and public cloud environments, executing mission-critical business processes, functions, and integrations. The organization's scope spans from the Gateway to the persistence layer, delivering the scalability, reliability, and efficiency needed to support Workday's rapidly evolving product landscape. Joining our team means embarking on a journey of opportunity to advance your career and contribute to impactful solutions that shape industries. Whether you thrive with solving sophisticated business problems, collaborating with agile teams, or championing innovation and software design, Workday offers an environment where your talents can thrive. We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer with a passion for architectural design and high-performance engineering. In this role, you will own the technical design and optimization of our core software platforms. You are a hands-on technical leader who can independently architect scalable systems, while simultaneously deep-diving into code-level profiling to eliminate latencies and resource bottlenecks. You will bridge the gap between application code and cloud infrastructure, ensuring our software is built from the ground up to be fast, lean, and resilient under production loads.
Responsibilities
- Design and Architect High-Performance Services: Lead the technical design of core features and microservices, ensuring they are decoupled, horizontally scalable, and optimized for low-latency and high-throughput.
- Write Core, Highly Efficient Code: Act as a primary individual contributor, writing clean, production-ready code for critical paths and refactoring legacy components for maximum efficiency.
- Diagnose and Resolve Performance Bottlenecks: Conduct deep-dive profiling, memory footprint analysis, and CPU utilization reviews using APM tools to proactively find and fix bottlenecks before they impact production.
- Optimize the Data Layer: Own the efficiency of data flow, including designing caching strategies, optimizing database schemas/queries, and selecting efficient serialization formats.
- Partner with Infrastructure Teams: Collaborate closely with the Cloud Infrastructure team to ensure the software design perfectly aligns with our AWS architecture, maximizing compute, memory, and network efficiency.
- Raise the Technical Bar: Drive rigorous code reviews, focusing heavily on architectural alignment, concurrency hazards, and algorithmic efficiency. Mentoring other engineers on writing performance-first code.
- Establish Benchmarking and Load Testing: Implement automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows within the CI/CD pipeline to catch performance regressions early.
- About You
- Basic Qualifications (Required)
- Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical work experience.
- Core Development: 8+ years of professional software development experience writing clean, high-concurrency, and production-grade code utilizing Python, GoLang, or Java/C++ .
- System Architecture: 4+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving scalable, distributed microservices architectures.
- Performance E
Additional Information
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.
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