Manager Site Reliability Engineer

Introduction

Workday, a Fortune 500 company and an AI leader in managing workforce, finances, and customer agents, is committed to building innovative solutions and fostering a culture of integrity, empathy, and collaboration. Joining our team means engaging in meaningful work alongside supportive colleagues in an environment that encourages risk-taking, skill growth, and long-term investment.

Team Overview

The Database Engineering group at Workday is charged with delivering high performance and scalable data solutions while ensuring high availability across thousands of production and non-production databases spanning multiple data centers, public clouds, and global regions. Passion for database technologies is essential here.

Role Description

We are seeking a visionary Engineering Manager to lead our Database Reliability Engineering unit. This is a leadership role focused on redesigning and advancing data infrastructure using software engineering principles, embracing open-source and cloud-native technologies to support applications at global scale. You will drive the shift from traditional database administration to automated, self-healing platforms and lead a team dedicated to database resiliency, security, and scalability.

Responsibilities and Qualifications

You will spearhead a high-performing engineering team focused on maintaining and improving database reliability, availability, and performance. The ideal candidate is a hybrid software/database engineer skilled in tackling distributed systems challenges and championing technical excellence.

Basic Qualifications

• Over 3 years leading SRE or Database Engineering teams managing large-scale database environments.
• More than 8 years in software or systems engineering, including at least 4 years in SRE/DBRE roles designing resilient infrastructures and automating failover systems.
• In-depth technical knowledge of database internals such as engine tuning, replication architectures, and query optimization, with practical experience managing databases in Kubernetes environments using Operators or StatefulSets.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.

Additional Qualifications

• More than 5 years managing critical data incident responses, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), and embedding root cause analysis to prevent recurrent failures.
• Expertise deploying observability frameworks using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Percona Monitoring and Management for health tracking and SLI/SLO monitoring.
• Strong familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and Continual Improvement Processes to manage work backlogs, minimize manual operations, and automate database tasks.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and cultivating a psychologically safe, high-performance culture.
• Capability to lead in-depth troubleshooting addressing Linux internals, networking issues, and distributed system latency.
• Hands-on experience managing database workloads on AWS (RDS/Aurora, EC2) and GCP (Cloud SQL, GKE).
• Understanding of team performance metrics and ability to enhance team effectiveness.
• Proven leadership in system incident troubleshooting.

Work Flexibility

Workday embraces flexibility by blending onsite and remote work. Employees spend at least half of their time quarterly in offices or with customers, allowing for tailored schedules supporting personal and business needs while fostering connection and community.

Equal Opportunity and Candidate Support

We are committed to an accessible, inclusive hiring process. Accommodations are available for candidates needing assistance. Workday values candidate privacy and does not charge fees or require applications through unofficial channels.