Senior Software Development Engineer

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.

Danu is part of Workday’s AI Centre of Excellence in Dublin, operating within the AI Platform organization to support a customer base of 60 million users. Danu’s charge is AI privacy — researching and translating sophisticated challenges in human-AI partnership, ML model performance, Explainable AI (XAI), and Responsible AI into production capabilities, with a specific focus on anonymization.

Our de-identification engine, ogham — named for Ireland’s earliest alphabet — already detects PII at industry-leading recall and efficiency at enterprise scale. We are now extending our privacy engineering capabilities to build the next chapter: a dedicated anonymization capability that will allow Workday and its customers to set new industry-leading privacy standards.

If you want to help set the benchmark for how a global AI platform protects sensitive data — responsibly and at scale — we’d like to meet you.

About the Role

As Senior Software Development Engineer on Danu, you will build and operate the services, pipelines, and interfaces that make Workday’s anonymization capability consumable by other teams across the AI ecosystem.

You will work alongside our machine learning engineers and external research partners who specialize in differential privacy and formal privacy analysis. Where they set the technique, you will own making it production-grade — throughput, reliability, and the APIs and SDKs partner teams build against. You will also extend ogham itself, the de-identification engine this capability is founded on.

Your First Six Months

You will productionize the first anonymization use cases — standing up the pipelines and service interfaces behind differential privacy and group anonymization techniques (k-anonymity, l-diversity, t-closeness), and building the harness that makes privacy-utility measurement repeatable.

Responsibilities

• API, SDK & Service Development: Build the REST/gRPC APIs, Python SDK, and CLI surfaces that let any team consume anonymized data and on-demand de-identification, and define the contracts partner teams build against.
• Pipelines & Runtime: Design, build, and operate the services and high-throughput data pipelines behind anonymization and de-identification — on Spark, EMR, and SageMaker — at enterprise volume.
• Applied Privacy Engineering: Implement and harden anonymization techniques — differential privacy, group anonymization, synthetic data generation — and build the tooling and harnesses that make privacy-parameter calibration and adversarial evaluation repeatable.
• ML Systems in Production: Own the engineering that keeps our models running at scale — GPU provisioning and utilisation, quantisation, batch throughput, serving, and compute cost — and support them in production, diagnosing memory errors, capacity constraints, and provisioning failures.
• Engineering Excellence & Mentorship: Drive engineering best practice across the team — Object-Oriented Design, automated testing at unit, integration, and end-to-end levels, CI/CD, and code review — and lead design reviews and mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
• Technical Communication & Partnership: Produce clear architectural documentation and API specifications, act as a point of contact for cross-team questions about de-identification and anonymization behaviour, and work alongside Product Legal and compliance partners to show our work meets their bar.

Requirements

• You are an experienced backend or ML platform engineer who takes complex systems from concept to high-volume production. You want to own systems where the bar is set partly by research and partly by legal obligation, and what draws you is making a promising technique dependable. You have a passion for machine learning and want to broaden your impact as a senior engineer working close to the models.
• Basic Qualifications
• Experience: 8+ years of professional software development engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting, building, and scaling robust backend or data-intensive systems.
• Core Programming Stack: Strong proficiency in Python, or in a comparable language such as Java, Scala, or Go with a willingness to work primarily in Python.
• Architecture & APIs: Solid experience with Object-Oriented Design, software architecture, and production REST/gRPC APIs, SDKs, and distributed microservices.
• Data Pipelines: Experience operating large-scale distributed data processing at enterprise volume, for example with Spark, including profiling and optimising for memory, throughput, and compute cost.
• Cloud & Production: Hands-on experience deploying, scaling, and maintaining production systems on AWS (or equivalent cloud platform).
• Testing & Quality: Thorough knowledge of testing methodologies and automated frameworks (e.g. PyTest, JUnit), and of CI/CD practice.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Other Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves)
• Privacy & Anonymization: Practical experience or research background in de-identification, group anonymization, differential privacy, or synthetic data generation. Given how recently these techniques have matured, we are looking for genuine aptitude rather than long tenure.
• ML Engineering: Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow, transformer architectures, Named-Entity Recognition (NER), LLM fine-tuning using the Hugging Face ecosystem, and model inference optimization for GPU hardware.
• GenAI & Agent Systems: Exposure to agent execution, agent orchestration, or LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g. LangGraph, LangSmith), particularly where agents consume sensitive data at scale.
• Responsible AI & Compliance: Understanding of Responsible AI practices (bias/fairness evaluation) and privacy regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, with the ability to translate design decisions for legal and compliance partners.
• Working with External Partners: Experience collaborating with external research partners or consultancies — assessing methodology and bringing results into production systems.
• Workday Pay Transparency Statement (For EU Locations Only)
• Listed below is the base salary range applicable to this position. Workday pay ranges (and the precise pay offered to the successful candidate) are based on a number of objective criteria such as relevant experience and skills, and educational qualifications, level of responsibility, demands of the role, work location and business need. 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 awarded by Workday Inc. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here .
• Primary Location Base Pay Range: €86,400 EUR - €129,600 EUR Ireland
• 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.
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