Sr Manager, Software Development Engineering

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 Data Platform and Observability Engineering team, located in Pleasanton, CA; Boston, MA; Atlanta, GA and Dublin, Ireland, is vital to enabling real-time insights across Workday’s platforms, infrastructure, and applications. We're committed to developing large-scale distributed data systems that support crucial Workday applications.
Our team provides software for the collection, ingestion, storage, analytics, and visualization of critical data assets. We manage hundreds of terabytes of data, encapsulating billions of messages produced daily by Workday applications and services.
We are looking for an Analytics leader who has a mix of business, product and technical skills. This leader has the opportunity to build amazing data products by leveraging vast repositories of Operational product & observability data. If you have a talent for finding actionable insights in large data sets and the business acumen to transform insights into strategic opportunities, we would love to hear from you.

About the Role

• In this highly technical role, you will help drive and execute the mission of Workday’s distributed data systems that power our products

• Responsible for leading, motivating and developing engineering teams. Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentoring to the engineering teams.

• Lead the adoption of practices like service ownership, shift-left testing, DevOps, Secure Coding life cycle, continuous delivery, SRE

• Ensure that the platforms operate at a very high degree of reliability and resiliency by focussing on monitoring/observability, automation, capacity planning, performance testing etc.

• Deliver amazing platform engineering outcomes through your teams in areas of ownership, building reliable, scalable, and highly performant services and features using industry best practices

• Develop internal data products by identifying opportunities and take the initiative to build such products.

• Construct foundational analytics tables with a canonical schema that power a majority of the analytics use cases.

• Drive the evolution of our data platform from traditional analytics to AI/ML-powered insights

• Manage cross-functional projects, utilizing advanced data modeling and analysis techniques to generate insights for strategic decisions and optimization opportunities.

About You

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience building and directly managing impactful Distributed Systems engineering teams

• 10+ years of experience with design and development building large scale distributed systems focused on analytics platform

• Bachelor's degree in a computer related field or equivalent work experience

• Proven track record of delivering high quality data products at scale

Other Qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems, MPP databases, compilers. Must have hands-on experience with a few technologies like Elasticsearch, Hadoop, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, Cassandra etc.

• Expertise in virtualization and container orchestration technologies(OpenStack, Docker/Kubernetes etc)

• You also bring an SRE mindset to the engineering team and strive to achieve operational excellence of the Platform. You bring rigor around all aspects of Service Ownership.

• Deep understanding and commitment to software engineering principles/processes (e.g. Lean, Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, TDD) and continuous improvement through measurement

• Must be a self-starter i.e. identify opportunities, build a business case and deliver.

• Must have good coding/scripting skills (Java or Python ).

• Good storytelling abilities using data visualization tools( like Superset, Light dash, Looker etc.) that provide actionable insights.

• Public cloud experience(AWS/GCP). Experience with Infrastructure Automation.

• Ability to work with less supervision - must be able to chart their own course by aggressive goal setting, priorities, roadmap and vision.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Ability to prioritize multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment

Our Approach to Flexible Work
 

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

At Workday, we are committed to providing an accessible and inclusive hiring experience where all candidates can fully demonstrate their skills. If you require assistance or an accommodation at any point, please email [email protected].

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