Senior Software Engineer(Distributed Systems)

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 (DPOE) team is building Workday’s next-generation, multi-petabyte scale Observability Platform. We own the libraries, distributed services, and infrastructure that power ingestion, storage, and query across the observability stack — Iceberg, ClickHouse, Tempo, Grafana, S3, Kafka, and Elasticsearch serving traces, metrics, and logs for every workload at Workday. Our roadmap directly shapes how the company detects, diagnoses, and eventually predicts operational issues at scale. About the Role As a Senior Software Development Engineer, you will own the technical design and execution for core components of Workday’s distributed tracing platform, built on ClickHouse and/or Grafana Tempo and backed by a big-data pipeline (Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg, S3). This is a hands-on role where you will tackle multi-petabyte scale challenges, optimize low-latency infrastructure, and help lay the technical groundwork for Observability AI. You will drive engineering excellence within the team, mentor other developers, and act as a domain expert for tracing ingestion, storage, and query performance About You Basic Qualification 8+ years experience in software development engineering. 4+ years experience specifically focused on designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures, evidenced by successful deployment of systems with high availability (e.g., 99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance. 5+ years experience with at least two of the following programming languages Java, Go, Scala, Python, including experience in writing production-level code for distributed systems. Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline; a Master's degree (e.g., MS in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or related field) is strongly preferred or equivalent practical experience. Other Qualification Strong ability in Algorithmic Thinking, including to build highly efficient and scalable solutions for complex high-throughput data ingestion and sub-second query performance challenges. Solid experience in API Development, including an understanding of gRPC, REST, and OpenTelemetry (OTLP), with practical experience designing and building scalable distributed APIs for observability data. Strong understanding of Code Testing methodologies, such as distributed load testing and integration testing, and experience contributing to end-to-end telemetry pipeline testing and CI/CD automation. Solid understanding of Distributed Systems Software principles, including data partitioning, eventual consistency, and fault tolerance mechanisms, with hands-on experience in Kafka, Spark, Flink, or ClickHouse. Experience implementing and maintaining High Availability strategies for critical distribut