Workday
Principal Distributed Systems Engineer
$187K–$334K
USA, CA, Pleasanton · Flex · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 22, 2026
- Experience
- 14+ years in software development engineering; 6+ years in complex distributed systems; 8+ years with at least two programming languages.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field; or equivalent practical experience. A Master’s degree is strongly preferred.
About the job
Own the architecture and hands-on development of Workday’s scalable lakehouse data-product platform, enabling teams to build, govern, and operate production data products and marts.
What you'll do
- Architect, build, and operate the platform across modeling, orchestration, distributed query, storage, catalog, security, and infrastructure.
- Drive performance, reliability, security, and operational excellence, including scaling, HA/DR, monitoring, and on-call support.
- Set technical direction across teams, mentor engineers, and establish reusable platform patterns and best practices.
What they ask for
- 14+ years of software development engineering experience.
- 6+ years designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures, including high availability and fault tolerance.
- 8+ years with at least two programming languages, such as Java, Python, or Go, including production distributed-systems code.
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to have
- Master’s degree in a relevant field is strongly preferred.
- Experience with visualization or semantic-layer tools such as Apache Superset, Metabase, or Looker.
Pay
$222,900 USD - $334,300 USD (base salary); $187,100 USD - $334,300 USD (base salary)
Tools
dbt Core, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3 Tables, AWS Glue Catalog, Terraform, Apache Superset
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative