Senior Software Engineer (Agentic AI & API Platform)
Posted Updated
Description
- As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Product Engineering, you will be a technical leader in designing and delivering high‑throughput, low‑latency APIs and frameworks that support Workday’s next generation of products and agents
- You will shape API design, drive performance and observability improvements, and coach and grow future senior engineers across the team
- Lead design and implementation of APIs and platform features used by Product Engineering teams
- Champion consistent API standards, patterns, and tooling that align with cross‑org guidance while solving concrete product needs
- Help Product Engineering teams expose capabilities via REST, GraphQL, and emerging integration patterns in a way that is friendly to agents and external consumers
- Lead end‑to‑end design and development of complex backend services and APIs
- Drive consensus with product managers, architects, and partner teams to define clear, evolvable API contracts and data models, using OpenAPI and internal standards
- Drive performance and scalability improvements, including latency optimization, capacity planning, and resiliency strategies for mission‑critical product flows
- Design and implement observability for product APIs (metrics, tracing, structured logging), and use data to drive technical decisions and SLOs
- Collaborate on frameworks, tools, and patterns that make it simpler for other Product Engineering teams to define, publish, and maintain APIs
- Work with data platform teams to define patterns for exposing data safely and efficiently to API and agent workflows
- Provide technical leadership through design reviews, RFCs, spike investigations, and coaching junior engineers
- Participate in and improve on‑call and incident response processes; own root cause analysis and long‑term remediation for significant issues
- Act as a trusted technical partner to teams across Product Engineering, helping them make API and integration decisions
- Hands‑on experience with observability stacks (metrics, tracing, logging) and using them to improve latency and reliability
- Ability to translate product and AI/agent requirements into robust API and backend designs
- Deep understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, multithreading, consistency, fault tolerance, and performance tuning
- Comfort working in ambiguous problem spaces with a bias for pragmatic, iterative delivery
- Comfort using AI‑assisted code generation tools (such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) as part of the day‑to‑day development workflow
- Experience with API gateway or edge patterns (routing, authentication/authorization, throttling, rate limiting, transformation, multi‑tenant concerns)
- 4+ years of experience building and operating web service APIs (REST/SOAP/GraphQL) at scale
- Strong testing discipline (unit, integration, contract, performance) and experience with modern testing and observability stacks such as JUnit, ScalaTest, Postman, Mockito, Jacoco/Scoverage
- Demonstrated experience owning complex features or systems from design through production
- 8+ years of experience designing and building large‑scale, mission‑critical backend systems
- Strong experience with API design and lifecycle: OpenAPI/Swagger, versioning strategies, backward compatibility, contract testing, and documentation
- Experience with cloud and containerized environments (e.g., AWS, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines
- 5+ years of hands‑on experience with TypeScript or Python and strong OO/functional design skills
- Proven track record of mentoring engineers, leading technical discussions, and driving cross‑team initiatives
- Familiarity with GraphQL and data‑oriented APIs; exposure to Data Cloud / analytical stores or MCP‑style agent integration patterns is a plus