Software Development Engineer (US Federal)

About the role

Your work matters here. At Workday Government, we focus on outcomes that serve a larger mission. Our work supports U.S. federal agencies as they modernize and transform the full employee lifecycle experience and finance operations-so they can operate with greater clarity, accountability, and trust. As a Fortune 500 company and a proven enterprise cloud platform, Workday brings modern technology, responsible AI, and secure infrastructure to some of the most complex environments in the world. The work isn't theoretical. It's operational. It's high-impact. And it demands rigor, integrity, and long-term thinking. From day one, you'll be part of a team that values collaboration, follow-through, and doing the right thing-especially when the stakes are high. Our culture is grounded in integrity, respect, and shared responsibility. We challenge each other to think clearly, act thoughtfully, and build solutions that stand up to real-world demands. Here, curiosity is matched with accountability. Ambition is paired with trust. You'll have the space to do your best work, the support to keep growing, and the backing of a company committed to long-term investment in both its people and the federal mission. If you're looking to apply your experience to meaningful, mission-driven work-alongside colleagues who take pride in building things that last-you'll find that opportunity at Workday This role will support one or more direct or indirect contracts with the U.S. Federal Government which, due to federal government security requirements, mandates that all Workday personnel working on the contracts be United States citizens (naturalized or native). May be required to be on site at client locations in the DC, MD, and VA (DMV) area. This role will support one or more direct or indirect contracts with the U.S. Federal Government which, due to federal government security requirements, mandates that all Workday personnel working on the contracts be United States citizens (naturalized or native). The Messaging, Streaming and Caching team is a full-service Distributed Systems Engineering team. We architect and provide async messaging, streaming, and NoSQL platforms and solutions that power the Workday products and SKUs ranging from core HCM, FIN, Integrations, and AI/ML. We develop client libraries and SDK's that make it easy for teams to build Workday products. We develop automation to deploy and run hundreds of clusters, and we also operate and tune our clusters as well. As a team member you will play a key role in improving our services and encouraging their adoption within Workday's infrastructure both in our private cloud and public cloud. As a member of this team you will design and build new capabilities from inception to deployment to exploit the full power of the core middleware infrastructure and services, and work hand in hand with our application and service teams! Role & Responsibilities: Design, build, and enhance critical distributed services, including Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ etc. Design, develop, build, deploy and maintain core distributed services using a combination of open source and proprietary stacks across diverse infrastructure environments (Kubernetes, OpenStack, Bare Metal, etc.). Design and develop core software modules for streaming, messaging and caching. Construct observability modules, alerts and automation for Dashboard lifecycle management for the distributed services. Build, deploy and operate infrastructure components in production environments. Champion all aspects of streaming, messaging and caching with a focus on resiliency and operational excellence. Evaluate and implement new open-source and cloud-native tools and technologies as needed. Participate in the on-call rotation to support the distributed systems pl