Sr Software Development Engineer, Business Process Optimization

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.

Admin 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 Role

About 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.

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.

Requirements

• Basic 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 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 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 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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