Data Engineering at Workday
Roles, Comp & Culture
An L6 staff data engineer at Workday sits around $338K total comp from 41 verified salary datapoints. The primary Data Engineering tech consists of Spark, AWS and Terraform, according to current job listings. Workday pays data engineers above other Technology companies. Reviews put them at 3.6 on Glassdoor, a little below the middle of the pack. Workday employees are under real strain and employee happiness is trending down over the past year. Layoff risk scores low for the next 30 days. 5 data engineering roles are open right now.
Workday data engineer compensation
Each level's figure is the median of individual Workday offers at that level, so it reflects a typical outcome rather than an average pulled up by a few large packages. Total comp counts base salary plus equity and bonus annualized over the vest, and the range shown is the middle half of offers, with the top and bottom quarters trimmed off.
Workday employee sentiment, tracked weekly
Employee happiness for data engineers over the past year, so you can see which direction it is moving, not just where it sits today.
Recent Workday events
Layoffs, leadership changes, and other major moves at the company, with dates.
- LayoffJun 2026Layoff
- LayoffApr 2026~154 roles cut
- Exec departureMar 2026Leadership change
- Exec departureFeb 2026Leadership change
- LayoffFeb 2026Layoff
- LayoffJan 2026~400 roles cut
- Exec departureFeb 2025Leadership change
- LayoffFeb 2025Layoff
Notable company events we track, with dates.
Workday data engineering tech stack
The languages, storage, and processing tools Workday data engineers actually work with, grouped by what they do. Tailor your system-design answers to this stack.
SQL
IcebergWorkday data engineer job openings
A live read on what they are hiring: open roles, recent postings, where, and at what level.
As part of Workday’s Data platform team, you will be responsible for building, enhancing, and extending our Spark and Trino-based large-scale distributed data processing platform in the cloud.
We’re Platypus, an AI/ML-centered data engineering team and our goal is to ingest, manage, derive, and serve data across Workday’s growing suite of AI/ML features.
Compute Infrastructure Scaling: Design, configure, and maintain the foundational compute engines and query layers (e.g., AWS EMR clusters, AWS Athena, Redshift) utilized by downstream data engineers, analysts, and BI tools.
Design, build, and secure high-throughput APIs, data connectors, and reverse-ETL patterns to sync data back into business systems (e.g., CRMs, ERPs, marketing automation).
Preparing for the Workday loop
The round-by-round process, example questions, and prep plan are on the interview guide.
Compare Workday with other data engineering employers
How the role, pay, and loop stack up against peer companies.
Prepare at Workday interview difficulty
- 01
Reading a solution is not the same as writing one
Every engineer who has frozen on a query they had read a dozen times knows the gap. The only preparation that closes it is producing the answer yourself, under time, before the interview does it for you
- 02
76% of hiring managers reject on the coding task, not the resume
From HackerRank's 2024 Developer Skills Report. Candidates who look strong on paper still fail the live screen if they haven't done timed, executable practice
- 03
5 problem shapes cover 80% of data engineer loops
Dedup, sessionization, top-N-per-group, slowly-changing dimensions, partition tricks. Writing the shapes by hand turns the unfamiliar into pattern recognition