Principal Software Engineer - Core Platform Integration

About the role

The Core Platform Integration Team is a new centralized team within Workday's Core Services organization that sits at the intersection of Workday's IPE (Infrastructure Platform Engineering) organization and our acquired companies.Workday has acquired several companies in the last couple of years that run multiple services across cloud service providers AWS and GCP with their own infrastructure patterns, CI/CD pipelines, and operational practices. Our charter is to bring these companies onto CP2, Workday's cloud-agnostic "paved road" platform, so that 100% of services can run on any CSP. That means migrating workloads off CSP lock-in services (managed databases, proprietary queues, vendor-specific identity, etc.) and onto standardized CP2 building blocks for compute, networking, observability, CI/CD, and security. This is a small, high-leverage team working directly with acquisition engineering leads, IPE platform owners, and Workday SREs. We operate in the open, driving architecture review boards, building migration scorecards, sizing onboarding effort, and producing the roadmap that shapes both what the IPE platform must build and what acquired teams must refactor. The work is technical, cross-organizational, and high-impact. As Principal Engineer, you are the senior technical leader for the acquisitions onboarding program. You set the architectural direction, make the calls that span multiple acquisitions and multiple IPE platform teams, and are accountable for the technical coherence of the end-state, not just that services move, but that they move in a way Workday can operate, secure, and evolve for the next decade. Concretely, you will: Own or co-own the overall migration architecture and reference patterns that all acquired teams onboard against: compute, networking (VPC/subnets/regional topology), data, identity, secrets, observability, CI/CD, and SRE practices. Lead or co-lead the Architecture Review Boards for each acquisition: separate the hard blockers (genuine re-architecture) from soft blockers (tool swaps), make the call on which CSP-locked services have acceptable CP2 substitutes today vs. which require new platform investment, and produce defensible T-shirt-sized effort estimates that senior leadership can plan against. Define the dual backlog that shapes the IPE platform backlog (features the paved road must build to unblock acquisitions) and the acquisition backlog (technical debt teams must clear). Drive prioritization across both with IPE leaders and acquisition GMs. Be the technical bridge between acquired-company engineering leadership and IPE. Acquisitions have with their own strong opinions and their own platforms, and have legitimate skepticism about replatforming. You earn their trust through technical credibility, then drive convergence. Set the bar for regional/sovereign architecture: data residency, regional ring deployment patterns, key management, and the elimination of CSP-specific control-plane dependencies. Make sure the migrations we ship today don't quietly recreate lock-in tomorrow. Establish the migration playbook and the repeatable patterns (Terraform modules, pipeline templates, observability conventions, SLO frameworks, runbook standards) so future onboarding takes a fraction of the effort of the very first onboarding. Mentor and grow senior engineers on the team. Run design reviews. Represent the program in leadership forums. Partner with leadership on org design and sequencing: which acquisition moves first, where to invest in SMEs or contractors, where IPE must staff up, and what's realistically achievable in 12 months versus what should be phased. This is a hands-on role at the architectural level. You will write code, IaC, and prototypes when that is the fastest way to resolv