Sr. Principal Architect - Observability

HR Tech Job; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 262,000 - 393,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday is seeking a senior Observability Architect to lead architecture, standards, and best practices for our Observability Platform. You will partner with platform engineers, product managers and stakeholders to evolve the platform and evangelize its use.

You will drive cross‑domain observability across logs, metrics and traces, and standardize tooling with open standards while collaborating with infrastructure and operations teams to deliver scalable, reliable systems.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 10+ years of software engineering/architect background.
• Experience writing high quality code in Java/Scala/Go/Python.
• Hands-on expertise with observability platforms.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural leadership for the Observability Platform.
• Drive incident detection, triage, and recovery via Observability MCP.
• Ensure seamless observability across logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
• Standardize tooling and publish open standards (OpenTelemetry).
• Collaborate across Infrastructure, Technology Ops and Product teams.
• Evangelize Observability to engineering teams and onboard them.

Skills

Software architecture

Observability

Distributed systems

Leadership

Communication

Java/Scala/Go/Python

Education

BS/MS in CS or related field

Tools

Prometheus

Mimir

Elasticsearch

Clickhouse

VictoriaMetrics

Jaeger/Zipkin

LangChain

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

Data Platform and Observability Engineering team empowers our customers and workmates with resilient, secure, massively scalable distributed systems, real-time observability, and operational analytics — enabling product innovation, faster problem resolution, seamless operations and data driven decisions. Our focus is on the development of large scale distributed data systems to support critical Workday products and provide real-time insights across Workday’s platforms, infrastructure and applications.

The team provides platforms that process Petabytes of data that enable core Workday products and use cases like core HCM, Fins, AI/ML skus, internal data products and Observability. If you enjoy writing efficient software or tuning and scaling large distributed systems you will enjoy working with us.

Do you want to tackle exciting challenges at massive scale across private and public clouds for our 10000+ global customers? Do you want to work with world class engineers and facilitate the development of the next generation Distributed systems platforms? If so, we should chat.

About the Role

This is a hands-on role, where you will be responsible for the architecture, standards, best practices for all things Observability at Workday. You will spend your time by working closely with the Observability Platform engineers, product managers, stakeholders, evolving the platform architecture, contributing to the Observability platform and acting as an evangelist for the platform. Here are some of the things you will be doing:

• This is a hands-on role, where you will provide architectural leadership for Workday’s Observability Platform and Services. You will be the domain expert across all the pillars of Observability.
• Drive Agentic experiences for incident detection, triage, and recovery - by owning & driving the Observability MCP and Observability Agents.
• Ensure a seamless Observability experience across data domains (logs, metrics, traces, alerts) and different infrastructure types (Virtualized, Kubernetes, Bare metal, etc.)
• Drive standardization of the Observability tooling, develop and publish standards, leverage open source specifications (OpenTelemetry etc)
• Closely collaborate with the Infrastructure, Technology Operations & Product teams.
• Promote & Evangelize Observability to all Workday engineering teams. Establish standard processes, frameworks, and help onboard engineering teams.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field
• Must have at least 10+ years of software engineering/architect background and a proven track record of delivering high quality products at massive scale
• Ideal candidate has 10+ years' experience writing high quality code (Java/Scala/Go/Python) and be able to design systems that meet the business needs.
• You have hands‑on expertise in Observability platforms like Prometheus, Mimir, Elasticsearch, Clickhouse, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger/Zipkin etc.

Other Qualifications

• Extensive experience with data collection agents, loggers, and visualizing and correlating data sets from multiple domains.
• Expertise in LLM orchestration framework(LangChain etc.), Observability for AI Agents(Latency, quality, online/offline evals, Track multi‑turn conversations, tool/agent invocations etc)
• Experience building Observability agents that help with Triage, Root Cause Analysis using open standards like Skills, MCPs and popular orchestration frameworks like LangChain etc.
• You have deployed Observability across the OSI stack.
• Expertise in low‑latency/high throughput data processing capabilities a big plus.
• Open Source contributions to popular O11y frameworks & platforms are a big plus.
• Outstanding presentation skills to both technical and executive audiences.
• You have strong communication skills both written and verbal.

Workday Pay Transparency Statement

The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role‑specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.

Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton

Primary Location Base Pay Range: $261,800 USD - $392,600 USD

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $221,600 USD - $392,600 USD

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in‑person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in‑office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision‑making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law.

Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodations, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.

If you require a reasonable accommodation, you may email [e-mail], as far in advance as possible.

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