Sr Manager, Software Development Engineering

Workday, Inc. (old); Dublin; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. is seeking a Senior Manager to lead the Intelligent Data Platform engineering efforts for our agentic data stack.

You will drive the architectural roadmap, manage a multi-level engineering team, and partner with Product and Deployment teams to ship reliable, scalable data agents. You will champion quality, observability, and cross-team collaboration while shaping a long-term platform strategy in a fast-paced enterprise SaaS environment in Ireland.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with 2–4 years in people leadership.
• Experience shipping user-facing platform or workspace products on a large-scale enterprise SaaS.
• Bachelor's in CS/Engineering; Master's preferred or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Shape technical vision and architecture for the Intelligent Data Platform.
• Lead and grow a high-caliber engineering team across levels.
• Translate platform bets into production-grade, shipped systems with PM collaboration.
• Present strategy and results to engineering and product leadership.
• Ensure quality, observability, and operational rigor for a reusable platform.

Skills

Engineering leadership

SaaS platform

APIs design

Data platform

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Master's degree preferred

Tools

APIs

Event feeds

Integration frameworks

Job 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.

About the Team

The Intelligent Data Platform (DLM) team owns the agentic AI engine that powers how customer data and configuration move through Workday's deployment and data conversion lifecycle — replacing manual, consultant-led ETL with autonomous agents that extract, transform, validate, and land data into live production tenants, unattended.

What we own:

The end-to-end agent engine and governance layer behind data movement — extraction and mapping agents, transformation pipelines, evaluation frameworks that score agent output for conversion accuracy, self-correcting drift detection, and the authoring environments engineers use to build and ship new data agents.

How we build:

AI-native tooling and automation that let engineers rapidly prototype, evaluate, and deploy autonomous data agents with built-in guardrails — trading one-off conversion scripts for reusable, self-validating AI systems that operate reliably across thousands of customer tenants.

Agentic engineering:

We build the prompt frameworks, context-ingestion pipelines, and agent orchestration tooling that let our data agents reason over messy, inconsistent customer data and make correct transformation decisions, error validation and loading.

How we work:

Close collaboration across deployment consultants, data conversion specialists, and the broader Deployment Technology organization — turning deep domain expertise in data migration into production-grade AI agents and skills.

About the Role

As Sr Manager, you'll lead engineering for Intelligent Data Platform, the agentic platform rebuilding ETL for Workday's deployment and data conversion stack — replacing hand-coded pipelines with autonomous agents that move, transform, and validate enterprise customer data at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with the team's Principal Engineers to shape technical vision and architecture for the platform, then turn that vision into an executable, prioritized roadmap.
• Lead, grow, and retain a high-caliber team of engineers spanning Associate to Principal level — shape their career trajectories, not just their task lists.
• Turn ambitious platform bets into shipped, production-grade systems, partnering directly with Product and Program Management on roadmap and prioritization.
• Be the senior voice for the team: present strategy, risk, and results directly to engineering and product leadership, and influence platform direction beyond your own team.
• Hold the team accountable to the engineering bar — quality, observability, operational rigor — for a platform that other teams build on.
• Hire and build: bring in top engineering talent and shape a team culture people want to stay on.

About You

Basic Qualification

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, including 2-4 years in a people-leadership role managing engineers, ideally within a large-scale enterprise SaaS platform.
• Proven experience shipping user-facing platform or workspace products, including work that required defining a system other teams build on top of.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline; Master's degree preferred, or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualifications

• Strong grounding in building unifying platform experiences - surfaces that aggregate and prioritize signals from many independent sources into one coherent view, rather than a single-purpose feature.
• Practical experience designing APIs, event feeds, or integration frameworks that other teams adopt, with an eye for what makes a "plug-and-play" contract genuinely easy for a domain team to integrate against.
• Working knowledge of prioritization or scoring logic - building systems that rank and surface the most important item among many competing signals.
• Comfortable partnering closely with UX design and research to validate that a unifying experience actually reduces cognitive load rather than adding another surface to check.
• Proven ability to lead through cross-team influence, since much of this pillar's value depends on domain teams outside your org adopting your standards.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity in a newly formed organization - defining scope and process where none previously existed, rather than optimizing an established team.
• Experience using adoption and engagement data to prioritize roadmap decisions and demonstrate impact to stakeholders.

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 candidat