Principal, Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

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 Join our team and experience Workday! It's fun to work in a company where people truly believe in what they're doing. At Workday, we're committed to bringing passion and customer focus to the business of enterprise applications. We work hard, and we're serious about what we do. But we like to have a good time, too. In fact, we run our company with that principle in mind every day: One of our core values is fun. The Developer Platform empowers our customers to expand the business capabilities of Workday by building on our existing technologies with AI capabilities. The mission of the Core Platform Service team is to establish the foundation for Workday Developer Platform providing best in class services such as Event Messaging Platform, Identity Management and Tenant Lifecycle Management. The team builds critical backend infrastructure services for the Workday Dev Platform. Leveraging the latest open-source technologies, our team owns the core security components and inter-service control that power the platform.. We work on scalable microservices and distributed systems, leveraging AI-driven development tools and modern coding practices. Our mission is to solve complex technical challenges, accelerating product velocity while ensuring our core services remain resilient and secure. About the Role As a Principal Software Engineer, you will partner with engineering and product leadership to shape the platform’s long-term architecture, vision, and strategic investments. We are looking for a product-minded engineer with a startup mentality—someone who can wear multiple hats, thrive in ambiguous environments, and act as an owner to drive core platform initiatives from conception to completion. You will lead the design of large-scale distributed systems and drive cross-team initiatives, prioritizing capabilities that unlock new growth. Ultimately, you will translate abstract, long-horizon goals into phased, executable engineering plans that ensure high-impact delivery across the organization. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and microservices architecture, combined with the ability to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions. You are not just building software to a specification; you possess a deep curiosity about how your components integrate into the broader business ecosystem, a relentless focus on customer adoption, and mastery of AI-driven engineering tools to drastically reduce delivery cycles You will solve complex technical challenges and drive cross-team alignment to ensure scalable, high-velocity delivery. What You’ll Do Architect, design, and evolve core product microservices and large-scale distributed systems that are secure, scalable, highly available, and mission-critical — with full end-to-end ownership of major platform initiatives.  Drive cross-organizational technical strategy, resolving complex and ambiguous challenges that span multiple services and business units to improve agility, modularity, and operational excellence.  Establish and champion best practices in domain-driven design, API contract management, and observability; advocate for technical debt reduction, architectural modernization, and adoption of cutting-edge tooling. Accelerate product velocity through automation, standardization, and repeatable design patterns, while improving end-to-end reliability, self-healing, and incident response across platform services. Champion and personally leverage AI-assisted engineering tools and autonomous coding agents (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate delivery, eliminate execution bottlenecks, and elevate code quality across the team. Lead cloud infrastructure efficiency and cost optimization across large-scale AWS/GCP deployments, ensuring architectural decisions balance high performance with financial scalability. Provide technical leadership and mentorship to senior and staff engineers, raising the overall technical bar and fostering a culture of continuous learning and engineering excellence.   About You Basic Qualifications: Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and production-grade microservice architectures. 12+ years of hands-on experience with object-oriented or functional programming languages, specifically Java or Scala. Solid experience delivering and scaling large distributed production services to a global enterprise customer base. 5+ years of experience building, operating, and driving cost-optimization for products within large-scale cloud environments, with deep expertise in AWS and/o