Software Development Engineer (Distributed Systems) - US Federal

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and enhance critical distributed services, including Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.
• Design, develop, build, deploy, and maintain core distributed services using open source and proprietary stacks across diverse infrastructure environments such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Bare Metal.
• Design and develop core software modules for streaming, messaging, and caching.
• Construct observability modules, alerts, and automation for dashboard lifecycle management of 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 distributed systems platforms.
• Manage and optimize Workday within the U.S. AWS cloud regions, ensuring security and operational standards.
• Partner with the Workday Federal Cyber Defense team to ensure security operations, governance, risk, compliance, and platform security health.

Requirements

• 2+ years of distributed systems experience.
• 3+ years of software engineering and systems, infrastructure, or platforms experience.
• 2+ years experience using one or more of the following: Ruby, Golang, Python, Java, Scala.
• 1+ 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.

Nice to Have

• 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, such as 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 technical details clearly to partners outside of the team.

Qualifications

• Educational background not explicitly specified, but relevant experience and skills are emphasized.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary with pay ranges based on location and experience.
• Potential eligibility for Workday Bonus Plan, role-specific commission/bonus, and annual stock grants.
• Flexible work approach combining in-person and remote work, with at least 50% of time each quarter in the office or in the field.
• Comprehensive benefits package (details available during hiring).