Associate Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) - Multicloud Platform

Description

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.

The Cloud Platform SRE team in New Zealand is part of a global Cloud Platform organisation with counterparts in the US and Ireland. Our mission is to ensure the reliability and availability of the cloud platform that hosts Workday's engineering and customer environments. We are dedicated to improving platform reliability, observability, and delivering operational success at scale.

We are a team of versatile SREs who blend software engineering with operations, with a focus on reducing operational toil. Our tech stack is cloud-native — built on Kubernetes, Istio, OPA, GoLang, Prometheus, Grafana, and more. We plan automation and improvement work using scrum practices with two-week sprints, and operate as an autonomous team with a follow-the-sun on-call model across three time zones (NZT, GMT, PT).

We are responsible for the safe change and reliability of customer environments, using SLO-gated multi-stage deployment automation. We partner with platform service teams to define and implement SRE standards, set benchmarks, and qualify services for production. Engineers from this team have shared their experiences at Cloud Native conferences, including KubeCon — so if you're excited about contributing to the community and building infrastructure that powers a global platform, this is the team for you.

About the Role

As a Cloud Platform Site Reliability Engineer, you will join a growing Auckland-based team. This role is instrumental in helping the team scale its impact across the global Cloud Platform organisation. You will bring a passion for identifying and solving problems in distributed environments spanning configuration, Linux operating systems, and networking.

You will be hands-on with distributed cloud-native environments, including Kubernetes-based infrastructure across public clouds (AWS, GCP). You believe that automation is the key to operating large-scale systems and are driven to ensure customer success. The platform you support is built using Cloud Native technologies (CNCF), providing a secure foundation on which Workday service teams and platform development teams can build, test, and deploy continuously.

Responsibilities

• Identify, diagnose, and resolve reliability and performance issues across distributed cloud environments, including Kubernetes clusters
• Design and implement automation solutions that improve operational efficiency, reduce manual effort, and enable the team to operate at scale
• Develop and launch effective SLIs to ensure that SLOs are achieved through building an extendable observability architecture, runbook automation, and establishing new processes
• Partner with platform service teams to craft and implement SRE standards for their respective services, defining benchmarks and automation to qualify services for production environments
• Collaborate with global SRE counterparts in Pleasanton, Atlanta, and Dublin to share knowledge, align on best practices, and deliver consistent operational outcomes
• Contribute to incident response, root cause analysis, and the development of detailed runbooks and processes that improve the team's ability to respond to and prevent future issues
• Support and sustain the cloud platform infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability for engineering and customer environments
• Participate in an on-call roster as part of a follow-the-sun model across three time zones, ensuring continuous platform coverage and rapid incident response around the clock

Requirements

• Experience
• Some exposure to site reliability engineering, DevOps, or cloud-native infrastructure concepts — gained through internships, personal projects, coursework, bootcamps, labs/certifications, or a prior role
• Basic hands-on experience with a public cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure), through university projects, personal builds, certifications, or professional exposure
• BSc in Computer Science or a related field — or equivalent practical experience, self-study, bootcamp training, or demonstrable project work
• Other Qualifications
• Growing familiarity with cloud-native computing concepts, gained through study, personal projects, or early career exposure — with an interest in understanding how reliable infrastructure is built and operated using CNCF technologies
• Some exposure to Kubernetes (e.g. through labs, certifications, or coursework), with a willingness to build deeper skills managing and troubleshooting containerised workloads; familiarity with related tools such as Istio, OPA, Prometheus, or Grafana is a plus
• Comfortable with Git and GitOps principles and workflows — from self-study, university coursework, or industry exposure. Hands-on familiarity with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD is a strong plus
• Working knowledge of Linux/Unix fundamentals, comfortable navigating the command line and basic system configuration, with enthusiasm for developing production troubleshooting skills on the job
• Some experience with at least one programming language (GoLang, Python, or Ruby — Go is a plus), and comfort writing or learning to write scripts and simple automation
• Awareness of common software development practices — iterative delivery, agile methodologies, CI/CD pipelines, and testing — with interest in contributing to code and build pipeline processes as you grow into the role
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with an aptitude for documenting processes clearly — you don't need prior runbook experience, just a willingness to learn good documentation habits
• Able to collaborate effectively as part of a globally distributed, multi-functional team while also working independently with minimal instruction. Comfortable partnering with colleagues across diverse backgrounds and time zones
• 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.
• Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision-making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law.
• Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodations, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.
• Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!
• At Workday, we value our candidates’ privacy and data security. Workday will never ask candidates to apply to jobs through websites that are not Workday Careers.
• Please be aware of sites that may ask for you to input your data in connection with a job posting that appears to be from Workday but is not.
• In addition, Workday will never ask candidates to pay a recruiting fee, or pay for consulting or coaching services, in order to apply for a job at Workday.