Senior Observability Platform Engineer

Workday, Inc.; Pleasanton, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. in Pleasanton, CA seeks a Senior Software Development Engineer to own the design and execution of core components for a distributed tracing platform built on ClickHouse and Grafana Tempo, supported by a big-data pipeline (Kafka, Spark, Iceberg, S3).

This role is hands-on, tackling multi-petabyte scale challenges, optimizing low-latency infra, and laying groundwork for Observability AI. You will mentor developers, contribute to architectural discussions, and drive engineering

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• 4+ years designing distributed systems with high-availability and fault tolerance.
• 5+ years with two of Java, Go, Scala, Python in production distributed systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering; Master’s preferred or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical design and execution for core components of the tracing platform.
• Tackle multi-petabyte scale challenges and optimize low-latency infrastructure.
• Mentor other developers and contribute to architecture decisions.
• Drive engineering excellence in ingestion, storage, and query performance.

Skills

Software development

Distributed systems design

Java

Go

Scala

Python

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Master’s degree preferred in CS/Distributed Systems

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Flink

Iceberg

S3

ClickHouse

OpenTelemetry OTLP

gRPC

REST

Git/GitHub

Job description

Workday, Inc. in Pleasanton, CA seeks a Senior Software Development Engineer to own the design and execution of core components for a distributed tracing platform built on ClickHouse and Grafana Tempo, supported by a big-data pipeline (Kafka, Spark, Iceberg, S3).

This role is hands-on, tackling multi-petabyte scale challenges, optimizing low-latency infra, and laying groundwork for Observability AI. You will mentor developers, contribute to architectural discussions, and drive engineering