Senior Principal Architect - Observability Platform Leader

Workday; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 262,000 - 393,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday’s Data Platform and Observability Engineering team seeks a senior architect to define architecture, standards, and best practices for observability across logs, metrics, traces, and alerts. You will work closely with platform engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to evolve the Observability platform and drive adoption across domains.

The role combines hands-on coding with technical leadership, emphasizing scalable distributed systems, OpenTelemetry standards, and rapid incident

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related field.
• 10+ years of software engineering/architecture, delivering products at scale.
• 10+ years' experience writing high quality code (Java/Scala/Go/Python).
• Hands-on expertise with observability tools such as Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Jaeger/Zipkin.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural leadership for Observability Platform and Services.
• Own and drive the Observability MCP and Observability Agents.
• Ensure seamless Observability across logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
• Develop and publish standards, leverage OpenTelemetry etc.
• Closely collaborate with Infrastructure, Technology Operations & Product teams.
• Promote and evangelize Observability to engineering teams; establish processes.

Skills

Software Engineering

Distributed Systems

Observability

Code Quality

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science

Tools

Prometheus

Mimir

Elasticsearch

Jaeger/Zipkin

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Workday’s Data Platform and Observability Engineering team seeks a senior architect to define architecture, standards, and best practices for observability across logs, metrics, traces, and alerts. You will work closely with platform engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to evolve the Observability platform and drive adoption across domains.

The role combines hands-on coding with technical leadership, emphasizing scalable distributed systems, OpenTelemetry standards, and rapid incident