Software Development Engineer, Distributed Systems & Cloud Technologies

Your work days are brighter here.

At Workday, it all began with a conversation over breakfast. When our founders met at a sunny California diner, they came up with an idea to revolutionize the enterprise software market. And when we began to rise, one thing that really set us apart was our culture. A culture which was driven by our value of putting our people first. And ever since, the happiness, development, and contribution of every Workmate is central to who we are. Our Workmates believe a healthy employee-centric, collaborative culture is the essential mix of ingredients for success in business. That’s why we look after our people, communities and the planet while still being profitable. Feel encouraged to shine, however that manifests: you don’t need to hide who you are. You can feel the energy and the passion, it's what makes us unique. Inspired to make a brighter work day for all and transform with us to the next stage of our growth journey? Bring your brightest version of you and have a brighter work day here.

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About the Team

We’re the infrastructure team behind Workday's data analytics platform, responsible for building and operating the distributed systems that power analytics at scale across both public and private clouds. Our work supports a rapidly growing customer base, expanding global regions, and increasingly complex data workloads. As we evolve the platform, our focus is on delivering highly available, performant, and cost-efficient infrastructure that can scale intelligently and operate reliably under pressure. We work closely with product, SRE, and engineering partners to solve real-world problems—from enabling on-demand compute for Spark workloads to improving system efficiency and observability. We value clear strategy, long-term thinking, and a culture where engineers are empowered to own problems end to end.

About the Role

We’re building a scalable, multi-tenant data platform that supports Apache Spark on both Kubernetes and YARN, serving diverse workloads across private and public clouds. As part of this team, you’ll help shape the next generation of compute infrastructure for Workday analytics. You’ll work on distributed systems that support massively parallel data processing, with a focus on performance, reliability, and simplicity at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and debug distributed software systems that run across multiple platforms and environments

• Develop tools and services that support efficient resource management, scheduling, and concurrency

• Work with technologies like Apache Spark, Kubernetes, and container-native infrastructure

• Balance system design trade-offs

• Collaborate across teams to deliver infrastructure that’s resilient, observable, and easy to operate

• Support large-scale data workloads with strong focus on performance, cost, and customer experience

About You

You’re a hands-on engineer who enjoys solving real-world problems with distributed systems. You’ve worked with large-scale platforms before or are eager to and you're comfortable making practical trade-offs in performance, reliability, and complexity. You care about writing clean, maintainable code and building systems that other engineers can trust and understand.

We’re looking for someone with:

• 5+ years of professional experience in software development engineering

• 3+ years working on distributed systems or data infrastructure

• Proficiency in one or more of: Java, Scala, Python, or Go

• Solid understanding of concurrency, multithreading, and performance tuning on Linux

• Experience with container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes) and cloud-native infrastructure

• Familiarity with resource scheduling, autoscaling, or workload management in compute-intensive systems

• A collaborative mindset—someone who enjoys working across team boundaries and sharing ownership

Bonus if you have:

• Experience running Apache Spark in production

• Knowledge of Kubernetes operators, service mesh, or autoscaling frameworks

• Exposure to monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry)

• A track record of simplifying complex systems or improving operational efficiency

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.

Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!