Workday

Sr. Principal Architect - Observability

Workday • $261K — $392K *
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
  • 10+ years in software engineering/architecture, delivering scalable products
  • Strong programming skills in Java/Scala/Go/Python
  • Hands-on expertise in Observability platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Elasticsearch)
  • Experience with data collection, visualization, and correlation across domains

Responsibilities

  • Provide architectural leadership for Workday’s Observability Platform
  • Drive experiences for incident detection, triage, and recovery
  • Ensure seamless observability across various data domains and infrastructures
  • Standardize observability tooling and publish industry best practices
  • Collaborate closely with Infrastructure and Product teams
  • Promote and evangelize Observability practices within engineering teams

Benefits

  • Flexible work schedule with a mix of in-office and remote work
  • Opportunity for product innovation in a rapidly evolving field
  • Collaboration with world-class engineers on large-scale projects
  • Participation in an inclusive culture that values diversity
  • Access to professional development and continuous learning opportunities
Full Job Description

About the Team

Data Platform and Observability Engineering team empowers our customers and workmates with resilient, secure, massively scalable distributed systems, real-time observability, and operational analytics — enabling product innovation, faster problem resolution, seamless operations and data driven decisions. Our focus is on the development of large scale distributed data systems to support critical Workday products and provide real-time insights across Workday’s platforms, infrastructure and applications.

The team provides platforms that process Petabytes of data that enable core Workday products and use cases like core HCM, Fins, AI/ML skus, internal data products and Observability. If you enjoy writing efficient software or tuning and scaling large distributed systems you will enjoy working with us.

Do you want to tackle exciting challenges at massive scale across private and public clouds for our 10000+ global customers? Do you want to work with world class engineers and facilitate the development of the next generation Distributed systems platforms? If so, we should chat.

About the Role

This is a hands-on role, where you will be responsible for the architecture, standards, best practices for all things Observability at Workday. You will spend your time by working closely with the Observability Platform engineers, product managers, stakeholders, evolving the platform architecture, contributing to the Observability platform and acting as an evangelist for the platform. Here are some of the things you will be doing:

  • This is a hands-on role, where you will provide architectural leadership for Workday’s Observability Platform and Services. You will be the domain expert across all the pillars of Observability.

  • Drive Agentic experiences for incident detection, triage, and recovery - by owning & driving the Observability MCP and Observability Agents.

  • Ensure a seamless Observability experience across data domains (logs, metrics, traces, alerts) and different infrastructure types (Virtualized, Kubernetes, Bare metal, etc.)

  • Drive standardization of the Observability tooling, develop and publish standards, leverage open source specifications (OpenTelemetry etc)

  • Closely collaborate with the Infrastructure, Technology Operations & Product teams.

  • Promote & Evangelize Observability to all Workday engineering teams. Establish standard processes, frameworks, and help onboard engineering teams.

About You

Basic Qualifications

  • BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
  • Must have at least 10+ years of software engineering/architect background and a proven track record of delivering high quality products at massive scale
  • Ideal candidate has 10+ years' experience writing high quality code (Java/Scala/Go/Python) and be able to design systems that meet the business needs.
  • You have hands-on expertise in Observability platforms like Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger/Zipkin etc.


​Other Qualifications

  • Extensive experience with data collection agents, loggers, and visualizing and correlating data sets from multiple domains.
  • Expertise in LLM orchestration framework(LangChain etc,), Observability for AI Agents(Latency, quality, online/offline evals, Track multi-turn conversations, tool/agent invocations etc)
  • Experience building Observability agents that help with Triage, Root Cause Analysis using open standards like Skills, MCPs and popular orchestration frameworks like LangChain etc.
  • You have deployed Observability across the OSI stack.
  • Expertise in low-latency/high throughput data processing capabilities a big plus.
  • Open Source contributions to popular O11y frameworks & platforms are a big plus.
  • Outstanding presentation skills to both technical and executive audiences.
  • You have strong communication skills both written and verbal.


Workday Pay Transparency Statement

The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below.  Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please .

Primary Location: USA.CA.PleasantonPrimary Location Base Pay Range: $261,800 USD - $392,600 USD


 

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $221,600 USD - $392,600 USD



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.

About Workday

Workday, Inc. is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. The Company delivers financial management, human capital management and analytics applications designed for various companies, educational institutions and government agencies. As part of its applications, the Company provides embedded analytics that capture the content and context of everyday business events, facilitating informed decision-making from wherever users are working. Its applications include Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Other Applications. It also provides open, standards-based Web-services application programming interfaces, and pre-built packaged integrations and connectors. Workday, Inc. is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.
Learn more about Workday
Size
15,932 employees
Market Cap
$42.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$282.4 million
Founded
2005
5 Year Trend
+26.7%
Revenue
$4.3 billion
NASDAQ

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