Principal Distributed Systems Engineer
Core
Architect and build Workday's next-generation data-product platform, a highly scalable lakehouse enabling teams to build, govern, and operate production data products and marts.
Role type
Principal Distributed Systems Engineer (Data Platform & Observability)
Builds
Modern lakehouse stack including compute, storage, catalog, orchestration, governance, and developer workflows for engineering and analytics teams.
Domain
Cloud Data Engineering / Distributed Systems / Data Platform
Required skills
Distributed systems architecture, dbt Core, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, AWS Glue Catalog, Terraform, SQL, High Availability/Disaster Recovery design, Multi-tenant access control, Cloud-native technologies, Data modeling, System security principles, Technical leadership
Preferred skills
Master's degree in CS/Distributed Systems, Experience with Kafka, Spark, Flink, Visualization layers (Superset, Metabase, Looker), Algorithmic thinking, API development
Technologies
dbt Core, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3 Tables, AWS Glue Catalog, Terraform, Apache Superset, Metabase, Kafka, Spark, Flink
Responsibilities
Set technical vision and architecture for the data-product platform; Mentor senior and staff engineers; Drive performance and scaling across modeling and query paths; Lead HA/DR design for platform services; Design security and access-control architecture; Operate the platform including monitoring, alerting, and on-call rotation; Evangelize platform best practices and patterns.
Seniority
Principal, hands-on IC with strategic direction and mentorship
