Site Reliability Engineer (distributed Systems)

Workday Job Opportunity

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.

About the Team

The Data Platform and Observability team is based in Pleasanton, CA; Boston, MA; Atlanta, GA, Dublin, Ireland and Chennai, India. 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 100s of terabytes 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

The Messaging, Streaming and Caching team is a full-service Distributed Systems Engineering team. We architect and provide async messaging, streaming, and NoSQL platforms and solutions that power the Workday products and SKUs ranging from core HCM, Fins, Integrations, and AI/ML. We develop client libraries and SDK's that make it easy for teams to build Workday products. We develop automation to deploy and run hundreds of clusters, and we also operate and tune our clusters as well. As a team member you will play a key role in improving our services and encouraging their adoption within Workday's infrastructure both in our private cloud and public cloud. As a member of this team you will design and build new capabilities from inception to deployment to exploit the full power of the core middleware infrastructure and services, and work hand in hand with our application and service teams!

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, build, and enhance critical distributed services, including Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ etc.
• Design, develop, build, deploy and maintain core distributed services using a combination of open source and proprietary stacks across diverse infrastructure environments (Kubernetes, OpenStack, Bare Metal, etc.)
• Design and develop core software modules for streaming, messaging and caching.
• Construct observability modules, alerts and automation for Dashboard lifecycle management for the distributed services.
• Build, deploy and operate infrastructure components in production environments.
• Champion all aspects of streaming, messaging and caching with a focus on resiliency and operational excellence.
• Evaluate and implement new open-source and cloud-native tools and technologies as needed.
• Participate in the on-call rotation to support the distributed systems platforms.
• Manage and optimize Workday distributed services in AWS, GCP & Private cloud env.

Basic Qualifications

• 4-8 years of software engineering experience using one or more of the following: Java/Scala, Golang.
• 3+ years of distributed systems experience
• 3+ years of development and DevOps experience in designing and operating large-scale deployments of distributed NoSQL & messaging systems.
• 1+ year of leading a NoSQL technology related product right from conception to deployment and maintenance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in developing distributed system software and deployments that perform well and degrade gracefully under excessive load.
• Hands-on experience with atleast one or more distributed systems technologies like Kafka/RabbitMQ, Redis, Cassandra
• Experience learning complex open source service internals via code inspection.
• Extensive experience with modern software development tools including CI/CD and methodologies like Agile
• Expertise with configuration management using Chef and service deployment on Kubernetes via Helm and ArgoCD.
• Experience with Linux system internals and tuning.
• Experience with distributed system performance analysis and optimization.
• Strong written and oral communication skills and the ability to explain esoteric technical details clearly to engineers without a similar background.

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.