Backend Engineer

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

About Sana

Sana is an AI lab building superintelligence for work. We believe organizations can accomplish their missions faster when teams can effortlessly access knowledge, automate repetitive work, and learn anything with the help of agentic AI. As part of Workday, we are committed to building AI that augments people - not replaces them.

We bring this mission to life through two products. Sana Agents provide a seamless way to access all your company’s apps, knowledge, and data, enabling AI agents to do real work so teams can process and act on information at unprecedented scale. Sana Learn is an AI-powered learning hub that combines the simplicity of a modern learning platform with intelligent features like an AI tutor, automated content generation, and interactive apps, making knowledge not just accessible but actionable.

We’re a talent-dense, product-obsessed team of engineers and designers from companies like Google, Spotify, Apple, and Databricks, united by deep technical excellence and rapid iteration. Our tools already help over a million people learn and work better across hundreds of leading enterprises - and we’re just getting started.

About the Role

About the role

You'll build and evolve the core services that power agents and product features, with a focus on enterprise-scale workloads, performance optimization, and long-term architectural sustainability. You drive architecture and systems design to ensure our platform can support high volumes of data, entities, and demanding enterprise clients.

About You

In this role, you will

• Design and decompose services and APIs for scale and clarity

• Build eventing and queue systems for reliable, high-throughput data flows

• Lead schema evolution, migrations, query/index optimization and caching strategies

• Define and enforce consistency models and multi-region readiness

• Optimize for performance budgets and privacy/tenant isolation

• Work hands-on with TypeScript/Node, Postgres, and distributed systems primitives.

What success looks like

• Core services are reliable, scalable, and easy to evolve

• Risks are identified and solved before issues become critical

• APIs are clear, well-documented, and power seamless product experiences

• Data boundaries are robust - privacy and tenant isolation are never compromised

• Performance budgets are met, even under heavy load

• You are a trusted partner for distributed systems design and implementation

Our tech stack

We build on a simple modern stack optimized for both humans and AI.

• Backend: TypeScript, Kotlin, Node.js

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Tailwind

• Databases: Postgres, Redis

• Cloud infra: GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform

Workday Pay Transparency Statement (For EU Locations Only)

Listed below is the base salary range applicable to this position. Workday pay ranges (and the precise pay offered to the successful candidate) are based on a number of objective criteria such as relevant experience and skills, and educational qualifications, level of responsibility, demands of the role, work location and business need. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants awarded by Workday Inc. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision-making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law.

Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodations, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.

If you require a reasonable accommodation, you may email [email protected], as far in advance as possible.

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