About the Role
As a Principal Software Development Engineer on the AI Model Serving team, you will be a technical leader who helps shape the vision and direction of the platform alongside the engineering manager. You will play a central role in making critical design decisions, driving outcomes across the team, and setting a positive and inclusive team culture. In addition to the model serving platform, the team also owns the production model registry at Workday, and you will help guide its evolution and ensure it meets the needs of ML teams across the organization.
Your work will directly impact Workday's ability to serve AI at scale — from traditional ML models to the latest large language models powering Workday's agents.
Key Responsibilities:
Help set the product vision for the AI Model Serving platform in partnership with the engineering manager, bringing a product-oriented mindset to infrastructure decisions.
Lead the team technically by making critical design decisions that drive performance, reliability, and scalability across the platform.
Design, implement, and maintain large-scale systems that enable moving ML models to production.
Write design documents to build consensus for new system components and enhancements to existing components.
Evaluate and uptake new technologies made available within Workday and across the broader industry.
Troubleshoot, improve, and scale continuous integration software pipelines.
Develop relationships with software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists on partner teams.
Respond to alerts and debug production issues to maintain platform health and reliability.
Review pull requests and enforce consistency, performance, readability, and security across code bases.
Develop documentation to share knowledge with other engineers.
About You
Basic Qualifications
8+ years of related work experience in software development, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
Other Qualifications
Software Development and Distributed Systems: Deep experience designing, building, and scaling production-grade distributed systems. You understand the full software development lifecycle — from coding standards and testing to code reviews, source control management, and deployment — and you can apply that knowledge to complex, high-throughput platforms.
Python: Deep proficiency in Python, with extensive experience writing production-level code and building systems in Python-based frameworks.
LLMs and Traditional ML Models: Familiarity with both large language models and traditional machine learning models, including how they are served, scaled, and monitored in production environments. You understand the operational differences and can design platform abstractions that serve both effectively.
You can design and maintain monitoring strategies that provide clear insight into system health, performance, and cost.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear design documents, articulate complex technical ideas, and build consensus across teams.
A collaborative approach to engineering, with experience mentoring other engineers and fostering an inclusive team environment.
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Workday Pay Transparency Statement
The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. 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. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please .
Primary Location: CAN.ON.TorontoPrimary CAN Base Pay Range: $168,000 - $252,000 CADAdditional CAN Location(s) Base Pay Range: $168,000 - $252,000 CAD