About this Software Development Engineer, Business Process Optimization role at Workday
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 Software Engineer on the BP Optimize (BPO) team, you will design, build, and maintain high-performance microservices and data pipelines that power Workday’s next-generation Agentic Workflow and Analytics Platform. BPO lies at the core of our enterprise AI strategy, processing millions of daily requests across 100+ Tier-0 enterprise customers through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-ready tools.
In this role, you will work hands-on with big-data technologies (Kafka, Spark/Flink, ClickHouse, S3), write clean, scalable services in Python, Java, Go, or Scala, and help extend distributed telemetry and tracing to AI agent execution paths. You will collaborate closely with Product, Data Engineering, SRE, and Legal/Compliance to ship reliable, low-latency features that scale globally.
Key Responsibilities
- Feature Development: Design, code, and deploy production-ready microservices and streaming pipelines for BPO's core analytics and agentic engines.
- API & Data Engineering: Build scalable REST and gRPC APIs to enable seamless integrations with MCP tools, LLM workflows, and observability frameworks.
- Performance & Data Pipelines: Optimize high-throughput data ingestion, indexing, and query execution on ClickHouse and distributed event streams.
- Quality & Automation: Write robust unit, integration, and distributed load tests, ensuring end-to-end reliability across CI/CD automation pipelines.
- Operational Monitoring: Monitor, triage, and resolve production issues to maintain high platform availability and low latency across global customer tenants.
- Technical Documentation: Author clean API specifications, component designs, and operational runbooks to support team scalability.
About You
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years experience in software development engineering including designing, developing, and deploying software solutions, with a strong focus on building and maintaining production applications and distributed systems.
- 3+ years experience in the following programming languages: Python, Java, Go, or Scala.
Other Qualifications
- Algorithmic Thinking: Solid ability in data partitioning, event-driven streaming, and columnar query optimization for efficient high-throughput data processing and microservice state management.
- API & System Design: Working knowledge of RESTful APIs, gRPC, and OTLP for scalable microservices and telemetry integration, combined with good OOD understanding — encapsulation, abstraction, and clean API design for modular architecture.
- Testing & SCM: Good understanding of unit/integration testing, telemetry-based performance monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines, plus working experience with Git, GitHub Actions, and Jenkins using standard branching/merge strategies.
- Software Development: Solid proficiency in Python, Java, Go, or Scala, with hands-on experience in Docker, Kubernetes, AWS infrastructure, and Apache Kafka or Spark pipelines.
- Collaboration & Documentation: Proven team collaboration skills — agile sprints, peer code reviews, cross-functional problem-solving — paired with good technical writing for design specs, API contracts, integration guidelines, and runbooks.
- Education: Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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
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 [email protected], as far in advance as possible.
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