Distributed Tracing Architect - Observability Platform

Workday; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 223,000 - 334,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday in Pleasanton, CA, seeks a senior architect to define the distributed tracing platform within the Observability stack. You will own the technical vision for tracing data ingestion, storage, and fast queries across ClickHouse, Tempo, Kafka, and Iceberg on AWS, shaping the future of Observability AI.

You'll mentor engineers, drive multi-region HA/DR, design security, and partner with ML teams to turn traces and metrics into automated incident insights, while evangelizing best practices

Qualifications

• 14+ years experience in software development engineering.
• 6+ years experience designing, building, and operating complex distributed systems.
• 8+ years experience with at least two of Java, Python, Go.

Responsibilities

• Architect and own the tracing platform for multi-petabyte scale, with sub-second queries.
• Own the big-data pipeline feeding tracing data via Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg-on-S3.
• Drive performance, scaling, partitioning, and storage optimizations for production loads.
• Lead HA/DR design for multi-region resilience, backups and recovery objectives.
• Design security architecture for multi-tenant data access across ingestion and query layers.
• Own observability platform operations: monitoring, logging, alerts, capacity planning, on-call rotation.

Skills

Distributed systems

API development

Algorithmic thinking

Team leadership

Java

Python

Go

Security principles

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Master's degree preferred

Tools

Kafka

Spark/Flink

Iceberg

ClickHouse

Tempo

S3

AWS

Job description

Workday in Pleasanton, CA, seeks a senior architect to define the distributed tracing platform within the Observability stack. You will own the technical vision for tracing data ingestion, storage, and fast queries across ClickHouse, Tempo, Kafka, and Iceberg on AWS, shaping the future of Observability AI.

You'll mentor engineers, drive multi-region HA/DR, design security, and partner with ML teams to turn traces and metrics into automated incident insights, while evangelizing best practices