Distributed Systems Engineer — Observability & Big Data (Remote)

Workday; Pleasanton (CA); On-site; USD 148,000 - 222,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday is seeking a Software Development Engineer to build and scale core features of the distributed tracing platform. You will work with ClickHouse, Grafana Tempo, and a modern big‑data pipeline (Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg, S3) on AWS to deliver high‑quality, high‑performance code for massive data loads.

This hands‑on role focuses on resilient backend services, distributed systems, and contributing to Observability AI while collaborating with Senior/Principal engineers to deepen expertise.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; Master’s preferred.
• 5+ years in software development engineering.
• 3+ years designing and operating complex distributed systems with high availability.

Responsibilities

• Develop and scale features for the distributed tracing platform.
• Maintain high-throughput data pipelines using Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg-on-S3.
• Write optimized, production-grade code for large data loads.
• Ensure reliability with robust error handling, retries, and failover.
• Apply security controls for multi-tenant data access.
• Maintain platform health with monitoring, logging, and on-call rotations.
• Support Observability AI with reliable data ingestion paths.
• Document designs and participate in design reviews.

Skills

Algorithmic design

Distributed systems

API development

Testing & CI/CD

Code quality

Security & multi‑tenant

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Master’s preferred or equivalent experience

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Flink

ClickHouse

Iceberg

Tempo

gRPC/REST/OpenTelemetry

Job description

Workday is seeking a Software Development Engineer to build and scale core features of the distributed tracing platform. You will work with ClickHouse, Grafana Tempo, and a modern big‑data pipeline (Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg, S3) on AWS to deliver high‑quality, high‑performance code for massive data loads.

This hands‑on role focuses on resilient backend services, distributed systems, and contributing to Observability AI while collaborating with Senior/Principal engineers to deepen expertise.