Workday Software Engineer Interview Guide 

Interview Guide 26 Jul 2024

The role of a Workday Software Engineer

Workday is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial and human capital management software company. Workday's key products in the market include Human capital management, payroll, financial management, and student administration software and app. Since its establishment in the early 2000s, Workday has grown to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with over 12,500 employees.

Software engineers at Workday design and build newer software and apps and upgrade the existing products for increased user satisfaction. To gain perspective on related positions, refer to our guides for Tesla Software Engineer and Airbnb Software Engineer.

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Responsibilities

  • Design, build and maintain the data API services built on AWS data lake infrastructure.
  • Design and architect scalable solutions to meet current and future business requirements
  • Suggest, research, and implement new technologies, methodologies, and practices to ensure the data services API layer remains stable, reliable, and scalable.
  • Design and implement a solution to monitor the overall health of the data service API ecosystem.
  • Provide production support to resolve issues as required.
  • Systemic thinking to design simple solutions to complex problems
  • Have the urge to question and discover alternatives to pre-existing paradigms
  • Test, maintain and document the system components and test & troubleshoot the existing tools.
  • Understanding of application development methods, Agile and Waterfall.

Skills/Qualifications

  • A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or another related field.
  • 5+ years of software engineering or software development experience, preferably in a technology company
  • 3+ years of Strong programming experience in object-oriented programming languages such as Java, C/C++
  • 3+ years experience in designing and developing backend code for data API layer.
  • Experience with distributed/complex software systems
  • Strong expertise in Spring framework
  • Experience in designing, building, and developing near real-time data pipelines using Java/Scala, Kafka, and MongoDB.
  • Have experience with NoSQL databases and especially with MongoDB
  • Experience building data services on cloud-based infrastructure and tooling such as AWS/Azure/GCP
  • Understand trade-offs of architecting RESTful synchronous and asynchronous HTTP APIs
  • Experience in Agile values and principles for building software
  • Experience with integrating applications via web service APIs - SOAP and REST

Workday Software Engineer Salary

Workday Software Engineer salary ranges from $138k to $234k.

Interview Process Overview

Usually, the interview process for the Software engineer role at Workday consists of 3-4 rounds:

  • Recruiter Screen
  • HackerRank online test
  • Phone Screen
  • Onsite Round 

Here's a more detailed description of the interview process:

Relevant Guides

Recruiter Screen

Overview

The recruiter screen is a 30-minute interview with the recruiter. This is an exercise to primarily assess if your experience and skill sets are a good match for the job. Many questions in the Recruiter screen are based on your previous experience/resume. So, make it a point to be thoroughly prepared with your resume. Keep your answers short, crisp, and structured. Interviewers may also be interested in knowing your motivation for the role. So, rehearse some of the most commonly asked questions, such as "Why do you want to work for Workday?"

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HackerRank Online test

Overview

After the recruiter screen, you will be facing a technical online test on the HackerRank platform. This is a timed test consisting of 3 medium-difficulty coding questions to be completed in 120 minutes. The online test consisted of 3 problems, one in Java, one in SQL, and one in JavaScript.

Interview Questions

  • Write a code to perform Breadth First Search (BFS) traversal of a 2-d matrix with memoization to find the shortest weighted path."
  • Given a String of [a-z, A-Z, 0-9], find the length of the longest substring that satisfies the following rules: a substring cannot contain digits [0-9], a substring should contain at least one capital character [A-Z]. e.g., given the String "aqW9ertyz", the longest valid substring has length 3 ("aqW").
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Phone Screen

Overview

Next up is the Phone screen. The phone screen is a telephonic interview round with a Workday Hiring Manager. This interview will last for about 45 minutes. The interviewer may ask a few technical questions and discuss the job responsibilities of the current role. Questions in this round are going to be theoretical and conceptual. So, revise your fundamentals well. Focus on Coding, especially OOPS concepts and system design questions.

Interview Questions

  • Can you call the base class method without creating an instance?
  • What do you understand by method overloading?
  • What is the difference between OOPS and Procedural programming?
  • What do you know about load balancing? What is its importance in system design?
  • Explain the steps involved in incorporating microservices into an e-commerce platform.
  • How would you determine the goal and scale of a system?
  • What do you understand by Polymorphism?

Onsite round

Overview

After clearing the phone screen, the next round is the onsite round. The onsite round is the most complicated stage of the entire interview process. Explore similar interview processes in the Wipro Software Engineer Interview Guide and Adode Software Engineer guides. You will spend roughly 7 hours on the interview day facing multiple interviews. The onsite round consists of a total of 3 interviews as under: 

  • Coding interview
  • System Design interview
  • Behavioral interview

Coding interview

The coding interview will involve writing code, debugging a given piece of code, and algorithms. The choice of language is up to the candidate, but interviewers prefer candidates well-versed in common programming languages such as C, C++, and Python.

System design interview

System design interview involves situational questions wherein you are asked to design the frontend/backend of apps, websites, etc. You may also be asked questions on scalability, multithreading, distributed systems, and Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams.

Behavioral interview

The behavioral interview is 1-hour long and is conducted by HR managers from Workday. This interview mainly aims to test a candidate's motivation for the role, leadership skills, and how good a fit they will be in the company. Questions are primarily situation-based. 

Tips

  • Focus on scenario-based system design questions as these are always asked
  • Cover the UML part well since Workday software engineer interviews almost always include a few UML questions.
  • Cover theory of static parts of concepts in sufficient depth as interviewers love to dive deep in the onsite round.

Interview Questions

Coding Interview

  • Given a few classes representing a school directory system, design and justify your design for OOP inheritance.
  • Write a function to print duplicate characters from a string.
  • Write a function to check if two strings are anagrams of each other.
  • Write a program to print the first non-repeated character from a string.
  • Write a function to reverse a string using recursion.
  • You are given a list of lists and write a function to find the smallest interval of numbers that includes a number from each list.
  • How do you check if a string contains only digits?
  • Tell us how you enable garbage collection in Java.

System Design Interview

  • Explain the concept of lower latency interaction.
  • Create the UML diagram of a filesystem
  • Design a database for recording workouts
  • Give me an idea about distributed microservices

Behavioral Interview

  • Why do you want to work for Workday?
  • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker.
  • What draws you to software and services engineering as a career?
  • Tell us about a challenge you faced at work and how did you overcome that.

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That's it for this interview guide. Follow the tips and tricks we mentioned in the guide, and we are sure you will ace your interview. You can also check out interview guides of other organizations for the same role.