Principal Software Engineer - Core Platform Integration

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 are shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun‑drenched optimism and drive to build smarter solutions, support customers, and create a space where everyone belongs. In return, we give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop, and a company invested in you for the long haul. About the Team The Core Platform Integration Team is a new centralized team within Workday’s Core Services organization that sits at the intersection of Workday's Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE) organization and our acquired companies. We bring those companies onto CP2, Workday’s cloud‑agnostic “paved road” platform, so 100% of services can run on any CSP. That means migrating workloads off CSP lock‑in services (managed databases, proprietary queues, vendor‑specific identity, etc.) and onto standardized CP2 building blocks for compute, networking, observability, CI/CD, and security. This small, high‑leverage team works directly with acquisition engineering leads, IPE platform owners, and Workday SREs. We operate openly, drive architecture review boards, build migration scorecards, size onboarding effort, and produce the roadmap that shapes what the IPE platform must build and what acquired teams must refactor. Our work is technical, cross‑organizational, and high‑impact. About the Role As Principal Engineer, you are the senior technical leader for the acquisitions onboarding program. You set the architectural direction, make the calls that span multiple acquisitions and multiple IPE platform teams, and are accountable for the technical coherence of the end‑state, not just that services move, but that they move in a way Workday can operate, secure, and evolve for the next decade. Concretely, you will: Own or co‑own the overall migration architecture and reference patterns that all acquired teams onboard against: compute, networking (VPC/subnets/regional topology), data, identity, secrets, observability, CI/CD, and SRE practices. Lead or co‑lead the Architecture Review Boards for each acquisition: separate the hard blockers (genuine re‑architecture) from soft blockers (tool swaps), decide which CSP‑locked services have acceptable CP2 substitutes today versus which require new platform investment, and produce defensible T‑shirt‑sized effort estimates that senior leadership can plan against. Define the dual backlog that shapes the IPE platform backlog (features the paved road must build to unblock acquisitions) and the acquisition backlog (technical debt teams must clear). Drive prioritization across both with IPE leaders and acquisition GMs. Be the technical bridge between acquired‑company engineering leadership and IPE. Earn their trust through technical credibility and drive convergence. Set the bar for regional/sovereign architecture: data residency, regional ring deployment patterns, key management, and the elimination of CSP‑specific control‑plane dependencies. Establish the migration playbook and repeatable patterns (Terraform modules, pipeline templates, observability conventions, SLO frameworks, runbook standards) so future onboarding takes a fraction of the effort of the first onboarding. Mentor and grow senior engineers on the team, run design reviews, and represent the program in leadership forums. Partner with leadership on org design and sequencing: which acquisition moves first, where to invest in SMEs or contractors, where IPE must staff up, and what is realistically achievable in 12 months versus what should be phased. This is a hands‑on role at the architectural level. You will write code, IaC, and prototypes when that is the fastest way to resolve a contested technical question, but your primary leverage is judgment, design, and alignment across many teams. About You You are a Principal‑level engineer who has led large multi‑cloud migrations or M&A infrastructure integrations end‑to‑end and shipped them. You’ve owned the architecture, navigated organizational challenges, made unpopular calls, and stayed accountable through the long tail of cutover, regressions, and operational handoff. Basic Qualifications 12+ years of software and infrastructure engineering experience, with deep production expertise across AWS and GCP at organizational scale. Proficiency in using the latest AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Augment) as a force multiplier to accelerate code understanding, migration work, and documentation. Fluent in Go and Python, able to debug a Kubernetes operator, and understand well‑designed services you've built. Demonstrable experience leading M&A or large‑scale platform migrations: evaluating acquired or legacy systems, designing the consolidation, sequencing the work, and bringing it to completion. Mastery of Kubernetes at scale (EKS, GKE), container networking (e.g., Calico), and service mesh (Istio or equivalent), including instrumentation for telemetry. Authoritative command of Terraform and Terragrunt across multi‑account/multi‑project organizations, with strong opinions on what “DRY infrastructure” actually means in practice. Other Qualifications A career arc that began in software development (high‑throughput APIs, distributed systems, backend services) and evolved into platform and cloud engineering. Bachelor’s degree in a computer‑related field or equivalent work experience. Deep observability expertise: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, GCP Operations Suite, and the design of long‑horizon telemetry/log warehouses (e.g., BigQuery). Strong views on golden signals, SLI/SLO design, and humane alerting. Production experience with enterprise CI/CD at scale (GitOps via ArgoCD or Flux; pipelines in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Harness) and a clear philosophy on safe, zero‑downtime delivery. Hands‑on experience with cloud‑scale relational databases (Aurora, Cloud SQL, Spanner) including multi‑region availability and migration patterns. Track record on security and compliance fundamentals: IAM least‑privilege, secrets management, encryption at rest/in transit, vulnerability scanning, and the basics of regulated/sovereign deployments. Strong coding skills in Go and/or Python for automation, migration tooling, and operators, not just glue scripts. Documented track record of bringing skeptical, distributed engineering teams into alignment around a shared technical direction through credibility and clarity. Skill in deciding when to standardize versus when to let an acquisition keep what works; making those calls and owning the outcome. Shipped hard migrations. Preferred Experience with regional/sovereign cloud architectures and data residency regimes. Experience building or operating internal developer platforms at enterprise scale. Familiarity with secrets management, IAM least‑privilege design, and basic security hygiene (vulnerability scanning, image signing, mTLS). 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. 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 Base Pay Range: $222,900 USD – $334,300 USD Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $187,100 USD – $334,300 USD Our Approach to Flexible Work With Flex Work, we combine the best of both worlds: in‑person time and remote. We enable our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We require 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 allows flexibility to create a schedule that caters to business, team, and personal needs while being intentional about time spent together. Those in remote “home office” roles can come together in our offices for important moments that matter. Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans. 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 . #J-18808-Ljbffr