Principal Distributed Systems Engineer

Job Summary

Owning the technical vision and architecture for Workday's data-product platform, the full-time remote Principal Distributed Systems Engineer will design and build a highly scalable lakehouse, mentor engineers, and set technical direction across multiple teams while ensuring high performance and reliability of data products.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and build the data-product platform using technologies such as dbt Core, Airflow, and Trino for high-volume ingestion and query performance
• Drive performance and scaling across modeling and query paths, ensuring operational excellence and high availability for platform services
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies to improve scalability, governance, and developer experience while mentoring engineers and publishing best practices

Required qualifications

• 14+ years of experience in software development engineering
• 6+ years of experience in designing and operating complex distributed system architectures with high availability
• 8+ years of experience with at least two programming languages such as Java, Python, or Go
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; a Master's degree is strongly preferred
• Extensive experience with large-scale data processing and lakehouse platforms, including dbt Core and Terraform