Workday
Senior Software Development Engineer (Distributed DB systems & Storage internals)
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
Document Persistent Storage Service provides secure, resilient, and highly scalable persistence with simple, easy-to-use APIs. We build, expand and extend outstanding database, key-value and object storage applications to store and orchestrate documents in a SaaS cloud environment. Our team's ownership is focused primarily on private data centers services but with an eye on growing the public cloud ownership also.About the Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Document Persistent Storage team, you will own the design, implementation, and scaling of our Erlang/Riak-based storage service, as well as the next generation of persistence-layer applications that will underpin our platform.
You have a strong knowledge of distributed systems including Service Oriented Architecture, multi-system application deployments, distributed data processing/management, clustering, networking, and load balancing. You are able to design services and solutions that process requests/data on many servers, are loosely coupled, scale horizontally, and are deployed globally.
We are looking for detailed understanding and application of low level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, concurrency, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale. Proficient in identifying bottlenecks and optimizing performance.
You perform well with minimum guidance and demonstrate proficiency in identifying and making improvements to scalability, reliability, service health, supportability, observability and manageability of the product and you implement resilience techniques like timeouts, circuit breaking, failover, retries, etc
You focus on defining clear, robust abstractions and modular architectures, while also designing well-structured programmatic interfaces that enable customers and internal services to integrate reliably at scale.
You can harness Erlang, Elixir, OTP, and modern distributed database computing technologies to deliver fault-tolerant, low-latency, and highly scalable databases storage solutions.
About You
Basic Qualifications
- 8+ years of proven experience designing and building large scale distributed database systems using open source technologies.
- 3+ years of demonstrated experience coding in Erlang, Elixir or other similar languages.
- Proficiency in debugging skills.
Other Qualifications
- Deep understanding of Linux networking and storage layers.
- Experience and understanding of the internals of at least one distributed Database system such as Riak, Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Cassandra, Kafka, etc.
- Master's or PhD degree in computer Science or equivalent experience.
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.
At Workday, we are committed to providing an accessible and inclusive hiring experience where all candidates can fully demonstrate their skills. If you require assistance or an accommodation at any point, please email [email protected].
Are you being referred to one of our roles? If so, ask your connection at Workday about our Employee Referral process!
At Workday, we value our candidates’ privacy and data security. Workday will never ask candidates to apply to jobs through websites that are not Workday Careers.
Please be aware of sites that may ask for you to input your data in connection with a job posting that appears to be from Workday but is not.
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.
