Technologist, Workday Environment Release Manager

About the role

Service Center

Essential Duties

Platform Engineering

• Own Platform Deployment Readiness Governance: design and operate the deployment readiness criteria, pre-flight checklists, risk assessments, and approval workflows that gate all Workday changes from sandbox development through production deployment.
• Serve as the COE's primary owner and representative to the Enterprise Change Advisory Board (CAB) - authoring, presenting, and defending Workday change requests in accordance with enterprise change control policies, risk classification standards, and CAB governance protocols.
• Ensure full adherence to enterprise Change Control processes for all Workday platform changes - including standard, normal, emergency, and expedited changes - maintaining complete audit trails, rollback plans, and post-implementation review documentation for every deployment.
• Govern configuration versioning across all Workday tenant environments - establishing tooling standards, naming conventions, and version control practices that ensure configuration states are documented, comparable, recoverable, and audit-ready at every point in the development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure & Operations (Help Desk) to align Workday platform change windows with enterprise Technology freeze periods, maintenance schedules, and incident management protocols, ensuring zero uncoordinated production activity.
• Establish and maintain internal COE engineering standards: peer review processes, sandbox usage policies, environment access governance, and promotion workflow documentation that scale with team growth and platform complexity.

Environment & Release Management

• Own and execute the Workday Tenant Lifecycle Strategy - governing sandbox provisioning and configuration, scheduled tenant refreshes, Customer Central transport management, implementation tenant readiness, and environment-to-environment migration planning across the full Workday tenant portfolio.
• Manage all Workday tenant refreshes end-to-end: planning refresh windows, coordinating cross-functional impact assessments, executing pre-refresh data masking (ex. Kainos Smart Shield), validating post-refresh environment integrity, and communicating status to all business and technical stakeholders.
• Administer and continuously improve data masking solution - maintaining masking rule sets, coordinating masking execution pre-refresh, validating masked environment data quality, and ensuring enterprise compliance with data privacy and security.
• Administer Workday Customer Central for transport and configuration promotion - managing transport packages, promotion requests, and cross-tenant migration workflows in strict alignment with COE change control standards and CAB governance requirements.
• Build and own the Workday Release Calendar - integrating Workday's bi-annual feature release schedule, internal COE project releases, integration deployments, Extend application releases, and enterprise blackout periods into a single governed calendar that all COE and business stakeholders plan and commit against.
• Operate the Release Intake and Alignment process - triaging, sizing, scheduling, and communicating all release candidates through a structured intake workflow that balances delivery demand with platform stability, change risk, and business readiness.
• Lead Deployment Automation maturity initiatives - identifying manual, error-prone deployment steps and driving automation of configuration promotion, pre/post-deployment validation, and rollback procedures to accelerate release velocity and eliminate avoidable human error.
• Govern Development Tooling and Configuration Versioning standards - evaluating, implementing, and maintaining tools that provide configuration tracking, change comparison, audit history, and version recovery capabilities across all Workday tenant environments.

Cross-Functional Partnership & Stakeholder Engagement

• Build and sustain strong working relationships with stakeholders.
• Partner with COE functional leads across Product Mgmt & Governance, Integrations, Reporting & Analytics, Security, HR and Finance to align release scheduling with project delivery timelines, business readiness requirements, and stakeholder communication plans.
• Translate complex Workday platform mechanics - tenant architecture, Customer Central transports, data masking, release mechanics, deployment automation - into clear, business-relevant language for non-technical stakeholders and Technology leadership.
• Partner with business teams to gather operational requirements, understand the downstream impact of platform changes on business processes, and establish a trusted advisory relationship.
• Support COE governance forums with regular environment and release reporting: release dashboards, upcoming change summaries, environment availability calendars, and post-release health reports.

SKILLS & COMPETENCIES: Technical Skills

• Workday Platform Architecture: Deep expertise in Workday tenant structure, environment types (sandbox, implementation, production), and the interdependence between functional areas as they affect environment and release management.
• Workday Customer Central: Hands-on experience managing transport packages, configuration promotion requests, and cross-tenant migration workflows within the Customer Central framework.
• Release & Change Management: Proven experience designing and operating enterprise release management and ITSM change control processes (ITIL-aligned), including active CAB participation and change authority representation.
• DevSecOps: Working knowledge of DevSecOps principles applied to SaaS platform operations - including configuration versioning, deployment automation, change gating, security-by-design, and audit trail management.
• Data Masking: Experience administering Workday data masking solutions (including Kainos Smart Shield), configuring masking rule sets, and governing data protection compliance across refreshed tenant environments.

Leadership & Business Competencies

• Strong governance and process discipline - comfortable both designing formal frameworks and operating within them, with an ability to balance rigor with delivery.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills - able to represent Workday platform complexity credibly in enterprise Technology governance forums.
• Highly organized with exceptional attention to detail - capable of managing multiple concurrent release streams, environment events, and change requests without allowing quality or communication standards to slip.
• Problem-solver with a resilience mindset - thrives in high-pressure situations, leads calmly through incidents and release complexity, and drives permanent solutions rather than temporary workarounds.

Education, Experience, and Other Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience managing Workday platform environments, including tenant lifecycle management, release management, and change control governance in a large, complex Workday implementation.
• Demonstrated experience with Workday AI/ML capabilities as applied to platform monitoring and operational analytics.
• Proven experience serving as a Change Advisory Board (CAB) representative for a Workday or enterprise SaaS platform, including authoring and presenting formal change requests.
• Experience administering Workday Customer Central for transport and cross-tenant configuration promotion.
• Hands-on experience with data masking tools in a Workday context; Kainos SmartS hield experience strongly preferred.
• Experience applying ITSM frameworks (ITIL preferred) to Workday or enterprise SaaS platform operations, including incident, problem, and change management.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.

CERTIFICATIONS, LICENSURES, AND LANGUAGE SKILLS (If needed)

• Workday Pro Certification in one or more functional areas, such as Platform, HCM, Finance, Payroll, Security (required).
• ITIL Foundation Certification (preferred)
• Kainos SmartShield administrator experience (a plus)

Physical Requirements

Position requires little to moderate physical activity. Handling of average weight objects up to 15 pounds; occasional standing or walking; frequently at a keyboard, workstation, or desk.

Work Environment

• Work is typically in a normal office administrative environment involving minimal exposure to physical risks. Hybrid / remote-eligible schedule available.
• Must be eligible to work in the U.S. with no restrictions.