Sr Manager, Software Development Engineering

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

The Intelligent Data Platform (DLM) team owns the agentic AI engine that powers how customer data and configuration move through Workday's deployment and data conversion lifecycle - replacing manual, consultant-led ETL with autonomous agents that extract, transform, validate, and land data into live production tenants, unattended.

What we own: The end-to-end agent engine and governance layer behind data movement - extraction and mapping agents, transformation pipelines, evaluation frameworks that score agent output for conversion accuracy, self-correcting drift detection, and the authoring environments engineers use to build and ship new data agents.

How we build: AI-native tooling and automation that let engineers rapidly prototype, evaluate, and deploy autonomous data agents with built-in guardrails - trading one-off conversion scripts for reusable, self-validating AI systems that operate reliably across thousands of customer tenants.

Agentic engineering: We build the prompt frameworks, context-ingestion pipelines, and agent orchestration tooling that let our data agents reason over messy, inconsistent customer data and make correct transformation decisions, error validation and loading.

How we work: Close collaboration across deployment consultants, data conversion specialists, and the broader Deployment Technology organization - turning deep domain expertise in data migration into production-grade AI agents and skills.

About the Role

As Sr Manager, you'll lead engineering for Intelligent Data Platform, the agentic platform rebuilding ETL for Workday's deployment and data conversion stack - replacing hand-coded pipelines with autonomous agents that move, transform, and validate enterprise customer data at scale. You'll partner with the team's architects on technical direction, own delivery of the platform roadmap, and lead a team with deep expertise across distributed systems, data platform engineering, and agentic automation, with direct visibility to engineering and product leadership.

Key Responsibilities:

• Partner with the team's Principal Engineers to shape technical vision and architecture for the platform, then turn that vision into an executable, prioritized roadmap.
• Lead, grow, and retain a high-caliber team of engineers spanning Associate to Principal level - shape their career trajectories, not just their task lists.
• Turn ambitious platform bets into shipped, production-grade systems, partnering directly with Product and Program Management on roadmap and prioritization.
• Be the senior voice for the team: present strategy, risk, and results directly to engineering and product leadership, and influence platform direction beyond your own team.
• Hold the team accountable to the engineering bar - quality, observability, operational rigor - for a platform that other teams build on.
• Hire and build: bring in top engineering talent and shape a team culture people want to stay on.

About You

Basic Qualification

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, including 2-4 years in a people-leadership role managing engineers, ideally within a large-scale enterprise SaaS platform.
• Proven experience shipping user-facing platform or workspace products, including work that required defining a system other teams build on top of.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline; Master's degree preferred, or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualifications

• Strong grounding in building unifying platform experiences - surfaces that aggregate and prioritize signals from many independent sources into one coherent view, rather than a single-purpose feature.
• Practical experience designing APIs, event feeds, or integration frameworks that other teams adopt, with an eye for what makes a "plug-and-play" contract genuinely easy for a domain team to integrate against.
• Working knowledge of prioritization or scoring logic - building systems that rank and surface the most important item among many competing signals.
• Comfortable partnering closely with UX design and research to validate that a unifying experience actually reduces cognitive load rather than adding another surface to check.
• Proven ability to lead through cross-team influence, since much of this pillar's value depends on domain teams outside your org adopting your standards.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity in a newly formed organization - defining scope and process where none previously existed, rather than optimizing an established team.
• Experience using adoption and engagement data to prioritize roadmap decisions and demonstrate impact to stakeholders.

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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