About the TeamAdmin Central is building the future of how administrators works across Workday-turning a fragmented patchwork of tools and disconnected AI into a single, unified experience.
Within Admin Central, the Business Process Optimize team powers the underlying platform infrastructure. You'll build mission-critical distributed systems, high-availability usage pipelines, and event-driven data flows across global product regions to ensure enterprise billing integrity at scale. If you're excited to build from scratch, move fast, and transform how thousands of admins work every day, come join us!"
About the RoleAbout the Role
As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the BP Optimize (BPO) team, you will drive the technical design and execution of core components powering our next-generation Agentic Workflow and Analytics Platform. BPO sits at the intersection of AI-driven automation, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and enterprise-scale observability, empowering over 100+ active Tier-0 enterprise customers and supporting millions of daily API requests.
In this hands-on role, you will solve multi-petabyte-scale data challenges, build low-latency infrastructure backed by ClickHouse and big-data streaming pipelines (Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg, S3), and shape the future of Observability AI. You will extend our distributed tracing and telemetry capabilities to LLM and agentic workflows (integrating tools like LangSmith and LangChain) to provide deep visibility into agent execution, tool calls, and prompt/response chains across global multi-tenant environments.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect & Build: Design, implement, and maintain highly scalable, fault-tolerant microservices and high-throughput data ingestion pipelines capable of sub-second query execution.
- Agentic Telemetry & AI Observability: Extend distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry (OTLP) to monitor agentic execution paths, tool invocations, and LLM reasoning steps across enterprise workloads.
- System Optimization: Optimize query performance and data retention strategies on ClickHouse, Grafana Tempo, and Apache Iceberg to ensure platform availability.
- API & Integration Design: Build high-performance gRPC and REST APIs to enable clean tool integration with BPO's Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework and Agent Ready Tools.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborate closely with Product, Data Engineering, SRE, Legal/Compliance, QA automation leads, and cross-team partners to deliver critical feature releases on tight timelines.
- Operational Excellence: Author technical design specifications, runbooks, and system architecture docs while contributing to CI/CD pipelines, load testing, and multi-region failover strategies.
About YouBasic Qualifications
- 8+ years experience in software development engineering, architecting, building, and scaling robust and efficient software systems, with at least 5+ years explicitly focused on designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures with proven high availability (99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance.
- 5+ years experience in writing production-grade code in at least two of the following programming languages and technologies: Java, Go, Scala, or Python.
Other Qualifications
- Algorithmic Thinking: Strong ability in data partitioning, dynamic sharding, high-dimensional vector retrieval, and caching strategies for high-throughput indexing and sub-second query execution over massive datasets.
- API & System Design: Solid experience with gRPC, REST, and OTLP for scalable distributed APIs (observability, analytics, AI agent orchestration), combined with strong OOD skills - clean abstractions, DDD, and microservices patterns for fault-tolerant architectures.
- Testing & SCM: Strong grasp of distributed load/integration testing, telemetry-driven regression checks, and CI/CD automation, plus solid Git/GitHub/Bitbucket experience with advanced branching, merging, and PR hygiene.
- Software Development: Solid proficiency in Java, Go, Scala, or Python, along with enterprise security practices (mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, encryption at rest/in transit).
- Collaboration & Documentation: Proven ability to mentor engineers and technically lead cross-functional pods, paired with strong technical writing for architecture specs, API contracts, runbooks, and LLM/agentic tracing docs (LangChain/LangSmith).
- Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience; Master's in Computer Science or Distributed Systems strongly preferred.
Workday Pay Transparency StatementThe 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 click here.
Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton
Primary Location Base Pay Range: $176,000 USD - $264,000 USD
Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $148,200 USD - $264,000 USD
Our Approach to Flexible WorkWith 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.
