Senior Software Engineer — San Francisco

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 Workday, founded in 2005, stands as a groundbreaking force in the human capital and financial management industry, with a global presence and a diverse array of customers. Across our offices worldwide, our teams are united by a shared dedication to innovation, collaboration, and excellence! The Core Services organization is responsible for the foundational technology that powers Workday’s applications and platform products. We design, build, and support a highly-performant distributed system that handles complex workloads at the scale required by the world’s largest organizations. Our infrastructure runs across both Workday data centers and public cloud environments, executing mission-critical business processes, functions, and integrations. The organization's scope spans from the Gateway to the persistence layer, delivering the scalability, reliability, and efficiency needed to support Workday’s rapidly evolving product landscape. Joining our team means embarking on a journey of opportunity to advance your career and contribute to impactful solutions that shape industries. Whether you thrive with solving sophisticated business problems, collaborating with agile teams, or championing innovation and software design, Workday offers an environment where your talents can thrive. About the Role We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer with a passion for architectural design and high-performance engineering. In this role, you will own the technical design and optimization of our core software platforms. You are a hands-on technical leader who can independently architect scalable systems, while simultaneously deep-diving into code-level profiling to eliminate latencies and resource bottlenecks. You will bridge the gap between application code and cloud infrastructure, ensuring our software is built from the ground up to be fast, lean, and resilient under production loads. What you will do • Design and Architect High-Performance Services: Lead the technical design of core features and microservices, ensuring they are decoupled, horizontally scalable, and optimized for low-latency and high-throughput. • Write Core, Highly Efficient Code: Act as a primary individual contributor, writing clean, production-ready code for critical paths and refactoring legacy components for maximum efficiency. • Diagnose and Resolve Performance Bottlenecks: Conduct deep-dive profiling, memory footprint analysis, and CPU utilization reviews using APM tools to proactively find and fix bottlenecks before they impact production. • Optimize the Data Layer: Own the efficiency of data flow, including designing caching strategies, optimizing database schemas/queries, and selecting efficient serialization formats. • Partner with Infrastructure Teams: Collaborate closely with the Cloud Infrastructure team to ensure the software design perfectly aligns with our AWS architecture, maximizing compute, memory, and network efficiency. • Raise the Technical Bar: Drive rigorous code reviews, focusing heavily on architectural alignment, concurrency hazards, and algorithmic efficiency. Mentoring other engineers on writing performance-first code. • Establish Benchmarking and Load Testing: Implement automated micro-benchmarking and load-testing workflows within the CI/CD pipeline to catch performance regressions early. About You Basic Qualifications (Required) • Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical work experience. • Core Development: 8+ years of professional software development experience writing clean, high-concurrency, and production-grade code utilizing Python, GoLang, or Java/C++ . • System Architecture: 4+ years of experience designing, building, and evolving scalable, distributed microservices architectures. • Performance Engineering: Proven track record of diagnosing and resolving complex performance issues, including memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks, and database/IO serialization delays. • Profiling & APM Tools: Hands-on experience with profiling, tracing, and APM tools (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, pprof, or CloudWatch) to analyze runtime application behavior. • Data Layer Optimization: Strong expertise in database optimization, including writing efficient SQL/NoSQL queries, indexing strategies, and designing multi-tier caching layers (e.g., Redis, Memcached). Other Qualifications (Preferred) • Cloud & Infrastructure Awareness: Solid understanding of how application code interacts with cloud infrastructure (specifically AWS or GCP compute, memory, and networking boundaries). • Testing & Benchmarking: Experience establishing micro-benchmarking, load testing, and stress testing practices (e.g., using Locust, JMeter, or k6) within CI/CD pipelines. • Concurrency & Parallelism: Deep understanding of asynchronous programming, multi-threading, memory management, and distributed systems concepts. • Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to drive design reviews, raise the bar for code quality through rigorous peer reviews, and mentor mid-level engineers on writing performance-first code. • Collaboration: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a proven ability to collaborate effectively with platform, data, and product engineering teams. 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: $190,100 USD - $285,100 USD   Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $160,100 USD - $285,100 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 accommodations@workday.com , as far in advance as possible. Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process! At Workday, we value our candidates’ privacy and data security.  Workday will never ask candidates to apply to jobs through websites that are not Workday Careers.     Please be aware of sites that may ask for you to input your data in connection with a job posting that appears to be from Workday but is not.    In addition, Workday will never ask candidates to pay a recruiting fee, or pay for consulting or coaching services, in order to apply for a job at Workday.