Principal Software Engineer, Operations 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 At Workday, we are committed to bringing passion and customer focus to enterprise cloud applications. The Operations Engineering team scales, maintains, and automates core infrastructure across bare metal and virtualized environments. We support CI/CD automation and configuration management strategies using tools such as Chef and Jenkins, helping ensure resilience, scalability, and operational excellence across global data centers and multi-cloud platforms. About the Role Role Overview We are seeking a Principal Engineer with strong experience in infrastructure automation, configuration management, and CI/CD pipelines. In this leadership role, you will help define and execute the technology roadmap for configuration management across bare metal servers and virtual machines. You will guide pull request review processes, establish CI/CD best practices, and scale and maintain automation workflows that support high availability and reliable operations. Core Focus: Chef Automation, Bare Metal and VM Orchestration, CI/CD Design and Maintenance Work Pattern: Multi-Cloud and Bare Metal Infrastructure at Global Scale Governance: Effective PR Reviews, Code Quality, and CI/CD Pipeline Automation Key Responsibilities Configuration Management and Provisioning Scale, maintain, and support enterprise Chef cookbooks, custom resources, and environments across bare metal and VM infrastructures. Standardize system configurations and automate bare metal provisioning and virtual machine lifecycles to promote high consistency across fleets. Support infrastructure testing best practices, including tools such as Test Kitchen, within Chef development cycles. CI/CD Automation and Jenkins Pipelines Scale, maintain, and optimize Jenkins automation pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment of infrastructure code. Automate testing, validation, and deployment workflows to reduce manual intervention in server configuration updates. Integrate security scanning, automated linting, and rollback strategies into core CI/CD pipelines. Code Review and Engineering Governance Lead consistent Pull Request review processes that support code quality, security compliance, and alignment with engineering standards. Establish operational guidelines, code styling standards, and testing frameworks for team infrastructure repositories. Mentor engineers at different career stages on infrastructure-as-code principles, effective PR contributions, and automation workflows. Bare Metal and VM Operations Drive lifecycle management, hardware integration, and OS configuration across large-scale physica