Workday

Workday

Principal Distributed Systems Engineer - Observability

USA, CA, Pleasanton · Principal

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 3 days ago
PythonJavaGoDistributed SystemsData StructuresAlgorithmsElasticsearchGrafanaAPI DevelopmentKafkaMachine LearningSparkCybersecurityHRISSystems EngineeringCollaborationMentoringWriting

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odds of building a lasting career here

42Risky
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role100
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70

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Employer immigration record

from this employer's Department of Labor filings

Green-card filing pattern in this occupation

Context, not a finding about this posting: of this employer's 92 green-card filings in this occupation, 100% were for a worker who already held the job.

Green-card intent detected

Workday, Inc. obtained a prevailing wage determination for Software Developers in Boulder, COLORADO on 2026-06-15. No matching green-card filing appears in our data yet. The determination expires in 7 days (2026-09-12), and a green-card filing must follow before then or the employer starts over.+2 more active determinations on file

Green-card follow-through: 98%

Of 58 labor certifications old enough to have been used, 1 expired without the employer filing the next step. Median time from filing to decision: 497 days.100% of their filings were for a worker who already held the job.Only certifications past the 180-day window are counted — recent ones cannot have expired yet.

Files H-1B transfers

49 transfer filings in the last year, covering 49 workers. Median labor-condition decision: 7 days. An employer that already files transfers is one that can take over an existing H-1B.

Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.

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About the role

  • Evaluate and introduce new technologies - open source and cloud-native - that materially improve the platform's scalability, cost efficiency, or capability.
  • Operate with high autonomy in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment - setting technical direction with minimal oversight while aligning with broader platform strategy.
  • Our roadmap directly shapes how the company detects, diagnoses, and eventually predicts operational issues at scale.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and build Workday's distributed tracing platform on ClickHouse/Tempo, designed for multi-petabyte scale ingestion and sub-second interactive query performance.
  • Own the big-data pipeline feeding tracing data - Kafka-based ingestion, Spark/Flink stream and batch processing, and Iceberg-on-S3 storage - including schema design, partitioning, compaction, and lifecycle management.
  • Lead HA/DR design for tracing services - multi-region/multi-AZ resilience, failover, backup/restore, and recovery time/point objectives appropriate to a tier-1 platform.
  • Design security architecture for the platform, including authentication/authorization (authn/authz) for multi-tenant data access across ingestion and query layers.
  • Drive performance and scaling across ingestion and query paths: storage format optimization (Parquet/Iceberg), compression strategy, partitioning/indexing, and query engine tuning under real production load.
  • Own operational excellence for distributed tracing: monitoring, logging, alerting, capacity planning, and participation in an on-call rotation for the platform.
  • Shape the future of Observability AI: partner with ML/AI stakeholders to define how tracing data feeds automated anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, and AI-assisted incident management.
  • Deep understanding of Large Scale Systems design principles like distributed data management or scalability strategies
  • Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work.
  • 6+ years experience specifically focused on designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures, evidenced by successful deployment of systems with high availability (e.g., 99.9% uptime) and fault tolerance.

Requirements

  • 8+ years experience with at least two of the following programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go), including experience in writing production-level code for distributed systems.
  • Extensive experience with Large Scale Data Processing technologies and frameworks
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • Bachelor's degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline; a Master's degree (e.g., MS in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or related field) is strongly preferred or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

  • Your work days are brighter here.

Compensation

  • $222,900 USD - $334,300 USD
  • $187,100 USD - $334,300 USD
  • 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.

Benefits

  • Our Approach to Flexible Work
  • 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.

Company info

  • The Data Platform and Observability Engineering (DPOE) team is building Workday's next-generation, multi-petabyte scale Observability Platform.
  • We own the libraries, distributed services, and infrastructure that power ingestion, storage, and query across the observability stack - Iceberg, ClickHouse, Tempo, Grafana, S3, Kafka, and Elasticsearch - serving traces, metrics, and logs for every workload at Workday.

Equal opportunity

  • Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.
  • If you require a reasonable accommodation, you may email accommodations@workday.com, as far in advance as possible.
  • 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.
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This listing is sourced directly from Workday's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.