Senior Software Development Engineer (US Federal)

About the role

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 Role

This role will support one or more direct or indirect contracts with the U.S. Federal Government which, due to federal government security requirements, mandates that all Workday personnel working on the contracts be United States citizens (naturalized or native).

May be required to be on site at client locations in the DC, MD, and VA (DMV) area.

The Messaging, Streaming and Caching team is a full-service Distributed Systems Engineering team. We architect and provide async messaging, streaming, and NoSQL platforms and solutions that power the Workday products and SKUs ranging from core HCM, FIN, Integrations, and AI/ML. We develop client libraries and SDK's that make it easy for teams to build Workday products.

We develop automation to deploy and run hundreds of clusters, and we also operate and tune our clusters as well. As a team member you will play a key role in improving our services and encouraging their adoption within Workday's infrastructure both in our private cloud and public cloud.

As a member of this team, you will design and build new capabilities from inception to deployment to exploit the full power of the core middleware infrastructure and services, and work hand in hand with our application and service teams!

Role & Responsibilities

• Design, build, and enhance critical distributed services, including Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ etc.
• Design, develop, build, deploy and maintain core distributed services using a combination of open source and proprietary stacks across diverse infrastructure environments (Kubernetes, OpenStack, Bare Metal, etc.).
• Design and develop core software modules for streaming, messaging and caching.
• Construct observability modules, alerts and automation for Dashboard lifecycle management for the distributed services.
• Build, deploy and operate infrastructure components in production environments.
• Champion all aspects of streaming, messaging and caching with a focus on resiliency and operational excellence.
• Evaluate and implement new open-source and cloud-native tools and technologies as needed.
• Participate in the on-call rotation to support the distributed systems platforms.
• Manage and optimize Workday within the U.S. AWS cloud regions, forming the core of the team responsible for this mission.
• Partner with the Workday Federal Cyber Defense team to ensure security operations, cybersecurity posture, governance, risk, compliance, and platform security health.

About You

• This role may require a security clearance at the TS/SCI w/CI Poly level.
• Applicants must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government issued security clearance.
• An active TS/SCI w/CI Poly is preferred.

You are a software engineer with distributed systems background and experience in systems like Kafka, Redis or RabbitMQ. You have independently developed features and deployed them to large scale distributed systems clusters.

Basic Qualifications

• MUST BE A US CITIZEN
• A minimum of 10 years of distributed systems experience
• A minimum of 10 years of software engineering and systems, infrastructure or platforms experience.
• A minimum of 10 years experience using one or more of the following: Ruby, Golang, Python, Java, Scala.
• A minimum 10 years experience working on US Federal projects
• Familiarity or prior experience operating large scale SaaS platforms.
• Good systems and networking expertise working on hybrid environments, both on-premise and cloud

Other Qualifications

• Experience in developing distributed system software and deployments that perform well and degrade gracefully under excessive load.
• Experience with configuration management using Chef and service deployment on Kubernetes via Helm and ArgoCD.
• Development experience with a wide range of programming languages, for example, Java, C/C++, Erlang, Python, Golang, etc.
• Ability and willingness to learn complex open source service internals via code inspection.
• Experience with current software development tools including CI/CD and methodologies like Agile
• Strong written and oral communication skills and the ability to explain esoteric technical details clearly to partners outside of the team
• Preferred DoD 8570/8140 compliant with at least IAT Level II certification, including a current Computing Environment (CE) credential and one approved specialty certification (e.g., CompTIA CySA+, GICSP, CASP+)

Pay and benefits

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

Primary Location: USA.VA.Reston

Primary Location Base Pay Range

$163,800 USD - $245,800 USD

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range

$148,200 USD - $264,000 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.

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.

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