Sr Software Development Engineer, Business Process Optimization

Workday; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. in the United States is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer to drive the design and implementation of core components powering our BP Optimize platform.

You will build mission-critical, low-latency microservices and data pipelines across global regions. The role blends AI-driven automation, MCP, and enterprise observability, requiring strong distributed systems experience and collaboration with product, data, SRE, and compliance teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software development, with 5+ years in distributed systems.
• Proficient in two or more of Java, Go, Scala, Python.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable microservices with sub-second latency.
• Extend observability and tracing across agentic workflows.
• Optimize queries and data retention on ClickHouse/Iceberg-based pipelines.
• Build high-performance APIs (gRPC/REST) for MCP and tool integrations.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Eng, SRE, and QA to deliver features on tight timelines.
• Create design docs, runbooks, and contribute to CI/CD and multi-region failover.

Skills

Java

Go

Scala

Python

Tools

gRPC

REST

OTLP

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

Admin Central is building the future of how administrators works across Workday-turning a fragmented patchwork of tools and disconnected AI into a single, unified experience.Within Admin Central, the Business Process Optimize team powers the underlying platform infrastructure. You'll build mission-critical distributed systems, high-availability usage pipelines, and event-driven data flows across global product regions to ensure enterprise billing integrity at scale. If you're excited to build from scratch, move fast, and transform how thousands of admins work every day, come join us!

About the Role

As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the BP Optimize (BPO) team, you will drive the technical design and execution of core components powering our next-generation Agentic Workflow and Analytics Platform. BPO sits at the intersection of AI-driven automation, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and enterprise-scale observability, empowering over 100+ active Tier-0 enterprise customers and supporting millions of daily API requests.In this hands‑on role, you will solve multi-petabyte-scale data challenges, build low‑latency infrastructure backed by ClickHouse and big‑data streaming pipelines (Kafka, Spark/Flink, Iceberg, S3), and shape the future of Observability AI. You will extend our distributed tracing and telemetry capabilities to LLM and agentic workflows (integrating tools like LangSmith and LangChain) to provide deep visibility into agent execution, tool calls, and prompt/response chains across global multi‑tenant environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect & Build: Design, implement, and maintain highly scalable, fault‑tolerant microservices and high‑throughput data ingestion pipelines capable of sub‑second query execution.
• Agentic Telemetry & AI Observability: Extend distributed tracing via OpenTelemetry (OTLP) to monitor agentic execution paths, tool invocations, and LLM reasoning steps across enterprise workloads.
• System Optimization: Optimize query performance and data retention strategies on ClickHouse, Grafana Tempo, and Apache Iceberg to ensure platform availability.
• API & Integration Design: Build high‑performance gRPC and REST APIs to enable clean tool integration with BPO's Model Context Protocol (MCP) framework and Agent Ready Tools.
• Cross‑Functional Leadership: Collaborate closely with Product, Data Engineering, SRE, Legal/Compliance, QA automation leads, and cross‑team partners to deliver critical feature releases on tight timelines.
• Operational Excellence: Author technical design specifications, runbooks, and system architecture docs while contributing to CI/CD pipelines, load testing, and multi‑region failover strategies.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in software development engineering, architecting, building, and scaling robust and efficient software systems, with at least 5+ years explicitly focused on designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures with proven high availability (99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance.
• 5+ years experience in writing production‑grade code in at least two of the following programming languages and technologies: Java, Go, Scala, or Python.

Other Qualifications

• Algorithmic Thinking: Strong ability in data partitioning, dynamic sharding, high‑dimensional vector retrieval, and caching strategies for high‑throughput indexing and sub‑second query execution over massive datasets.
• API & System Design: Solid experience with gRPC, REST, and OTLP for scalable distributed APIs (observability, analytics, AI agent orchestration), combined with strong OOD skills - clean abstractions, DDD, and microservices patterns for fault‑tolerant architectures.
• Testing & SCM: Strong grasp of distributed load/integration testing, telemetry‑driven regression