Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
People Systems roles are increasingly central in SaaS companies where headcount growth, compliance, and operational reliability must scale alongside product and revenue. This Workday Engineer position sits at that intersection, treating HR technology as a platform that needs engineering discipline, not just administration. The remit spans integrations, workflow automation, and architecture, which reflects how modern SaaS operators rely on connected systems to keep core business processes coherent as tooling proliferates.
For a SaaS career, the role builds durable experience in designing and operating business critical internal systems with production standards. Workday integration work develops fluency in data flows, identity and access considerations, change management, and reliability practices that translate to many SaaS environments. The emphasis on Git based workflows, testing, and operational rigor also aligns People Systems work with broader engineering norms, making the skill set portable across internal platform, enterprise applications, and automation focused teams.
This role suits professionals who prefer ambiguous systems problems over purely configuration led work, and who enjoy partnering across People, Finance, Security, and Engineering to turn operational needs into maintainable solutions. It is a strong match for someone motivated by integration depth, workflow design, and long term system stewardship in a SaaS oriented operating model.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI's People team helps hire, develop, and support the people building safe and beneficial AGI. Within that team, People Systems builds the technical foundation that enables our HR, recruiting, payroll, benefits, and performance operations to scale with quality, speed, and rigor.
We work at the intersection of HR systems, software engineering, and internal tooling. Our goal is not just to keep core systems running, but to build durable technical leverage for the company.
About the Role
We're hiring a Workday Engineer to help design, build, and operate the systems that power critical people workflows at OpenAI.
This is a highly technical role for someone who combines strong Workday expertise with real engineering fluency. You'll build reliable integrations, improve system architecture, automate complex workflows, and help connect Workday to internal tools, external platforms, and emerging AI-driven systems.
You should be comfortable going beyond configuration work. We're looking for someone who can reason through ambiguous systems problems, write and debug technical solutions, work effectively in Git-based environments, and use modern developer workflows, including CLI-driven tooling, to build and operate with speed and discipline.
You'll partner closely with cross-functional teams across People, Finance, Security, and Engineering, including our People Innovations team, to build systems that are secure, scalable, and practical. Some work will involve improving mature production infrastructure; some will involve building entirely new workflows and capabilities from scratch.
In this role, you will
Design, build, and maintain Workday integrations, applications, and workflow automations across domains such as payroll, benefits, recruiting, performance, and case management
Improve the reliability, quality, and scalability of People systems through strong engineering, testing, and operational practices
Build technical solutions that connect Workday with internal platforms, external vendors, and AI-powered tooling
Contribute to more agentic internal workflows by helping design systems that combine HR data, automation, orchestration, and intelligent tooling
Use Git-based development practices, code review, and structured change management to deliver safely in a fast-moving environment
Use CLI-based tools and developer workflows to build, test, troubleshoot, and support production systems efficiently
Partner with stakeholders across People, Finance, Security, and Engineering to translate business needs into durable technical solutions
Establish and raise standards for observability, security, supportability, and long-term maintainability across the People systems stack
You might thrive in this role if you have
5-10 years of experience in Workday engineering, integrations, platform automation, or adjacent systems engineering roles
Strong hands-on experience with Workday technologies such as EIB, Studio, Cloud Connect, Extend, reporting, calculated fields, security, and business process design
A track record of building technical solutions beyond administration or configuration alone, including automation, scripting, debugging, and systems design
Comfort working in Git-based environments with modern software development practices
Strong fluency with CLI-based workflows and developer tools
Experience designing and supporting production integrations with a high bar for reliability, security, and data quality
Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work through ambiguous technical and operational challenges
The ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical partners
Interest in agentic systems, AI-enabled internal tooling, or LLM-powered workflow design
Nice to have
Experience integrating Workday with finance systems, identity systems, recruiting tools, case management platforms, or internal developer platforms
Experience with observability, alerting, and production support for business-critical workflows
Experience building internal tools or automation frameworks in high-growth environments
Familiarity with secure systems design and governance in environments handling sensitive employee data
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
