Staff Workday Integration Engineer

Job Description

The Community You Will Join:

The Talent Systems team within BizTech is the trusted technology partner to Employee Experience, Recruiting, Payroll, Procurement, Legal, and Privacy teams across Airbnb's global operations. Driven by the philosophy of "High Tech, Human Touch," we design and implement technology that meets both business objectives and employee needs, building robust frameworks that support the full employee journey, delivering AI-enabled self-service tools, and playing a key role in payroll management and benefits enrollment.

We own and operate a portfolio of 300+ production integrations spanning payroll processors, benefits carriers, identity providers, compliance vendors, and internal platforms, with Workday at the center. You'll partner closely with HR Centers of Excellence, IT Security, Finance, and external vendors to deliver enterprise-grade integration solutions that power Airbnb's global HR technology ecosystem.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a Staff Workday Integration Engineer, you are the technical authority for the integration initiatives that BizTech and Airbnb depend on. You will help define our integration strategy and technical roadmap, setting architectural standards that enable seamless HR data flows across our global employee population.

This is a hands-on builder role. You will personally write integration logic, own production reliability, and make the architectural decisions other engineers build against. You will drive touchless automation, reduce manual intervention, and ensure compliance across multiple jurisdictions. Your work directly impacts how thousands of Airbnb employees experience their payroll, benefits, time tracking, and HR processes.

As a Staff-level engineer, you will think 12+ months ahead, proactively surface systemic gaps, and establish patterns adopted across the Talent Systems team. The team is also actively investing in agentic systems and AI-enabled internal tooling that reshape how employees interact with HR processes, and you will gain hands-on exposure to that work.

A Typical Day:

Integration Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Define and own Airbnb's Workday integration architecture standards, patterns, and governance frameworks
• Lead architectural decisions for complex, high-risk integration initiatives, including global rollouts, payroll runs, benefits open enrollment, and system migrations
• Evaluate and advise on build-vs-buy decisions, Workday-native-vs-middleware trade-offs, and long-term integration platform strategy
• Establish reusable integration design patterns, error handling frameworks, and observability standards adopted team-wide
• Anticipate platform evolution and architect integrations that accommodate Workday's semi-annual releases with minimal rework

Core Workday Integration Development

• Architect, design, build, and maintain complex inbound and outbound integrations using Workday Studio, Core Connectors, EIBs, Document Transforms, and RaaS API endpoints
• Develop integrations against Workday Web Services (WWS): WSDL interpretation, web service versioning, request/response handling for SOAP and REST
• Own design and delivery of high-volume integration scenarios: payroll runs, benefits open enrollment, global workforce changes, and multi-country rollouts
• Build and maintain advanced Custom Reports and Calculated Fields for integration consumption
• Work deeply within the Business Process Framework, understanding how process events trigger integration flows
• Maintain expert knowledge of Workday payroll interfaces (PECI, PICOF) and their interaction with third-party payroll providers
• Manage integration portfolio across Workday's semi-annual release cycle: assess release notes, lead sandbox testing, deploy to production with rigorous change controls

Workday Extend & Orchestrate

• Define and own Airbnb's adoption strategy for Workday Extend, including when Extend is the right tool versus Studio, EIB, or middleware
• Architect and build custom Workday Extend applications (data models, business logic, UI pages, orchestration flows) for HR processes not supported natively
• Design and expose Extend REST APIs for internal consumers and external vendor integrations; govern API versioning, OAuth 2.0 authentication, and rate limit strategies
• Lead adoption of Workday Orchestrate for multi-system workflow coordination across Workday and external systems
• Own the Extend and Orchestrate application lifecycle: requirements, design, development, sandbox testing, production deployment, and ongoing maintenance

Production Reliability, Operations & Platform Governance

• Drive operational excellence across the integration portfolio: SLAs, prioritization, and escalation handling
• Own SLAs for the most critical integrations; establish monitoring, alerting, retry logic, idempotency, and runbook standards that raise the bar across the team
• Drive root cause analysis on integration failures and implement preventative controls
• Implement PII handling, audit controls, and data reconciliation strategies meeting GDPR, India PDPB, and SOC 2 requirements
• Enforce data security protocols: PGP, SSH, SFTP, HTTPS, OAuth 2.0, SAML, and WS-Security across all integration surfaces
• Own tenant deployment strategy: sandbox to production promotion, Git-based version control of integration artifacts, and rollback planning

HR Technology & Functional Knowledge

• Maintain a strong working understanding of core HR and payroll processes (hire-to-retire, compensation cycles, benefits enrollment, compliance reporting) sufficient to design integrations that reflect real business requirements
• Partner with Employee Experience, Recruiting, Payroll, Total Rewards, and Legal/Privacy to translate HR process requirements into sound technical architectures
• Understand how HR data flows across the enterprise: from Workday as the system of record through downstream payroll processors, benefits carriers, identity providers, and compliance platforms
• Proactively surface configuration and upstream data issues that affect integration reliability, and partner with functional owners to resolve them
• Bring an employee-centric lens to integration design so the technology we build translates to seamless experiences for the people it serves

Technical Leadership & Cross-Functional Influence

• Act as a technical authority for Workday integrations across BizTech; influence architectural decisions in adjacent teams including middleware, Identity, and Data Platform
• Mentor and upskill senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair development, and documented standards
• Translate ambiguous, high-level business requirements into sound technical architectures; clearly communicate constraints, trade-offs, and risks to stakeholders at all levels
• Write authoritative Integration Design Documents and operational runbooks maintainable by the broader team
• Proactively identify systemic risks and integration portfolio health issues; drive resolution and communicate transparently with leadership
• Represent Talent Systems in enterprise architecture forums and vendor technical discussions on integration topics

Your Expertise:

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 12+ years of industry experience in software development or systems integration
• 8+ years of hands-on Workday integration development covering the full lifecycle: requirements, design, build, testing, go-live, and post-production support

Workday Integration Proficiency (personally written code required):

• Workday Studio: complex multi-step integrations, sub-integrations, custom error handling and fault frameworks, XSLT transformations
• Core Connectors: worker data, business process events, payroll and benefits outbound connectors
• Enterprise Interface Builder (EIBs): deep knowledge of appropriate use cases and limitations versus Studio
• Document Transforms: payload mapping and field-level transformation logic
• RaaS (Report-as-a-Service): advanced report design, calculated fields, and API endpoint exposure
• Workday Web Services (WWS): WSDL reading, SOAP/REST calls, versioning, and error response handling

Workday-Native & Functional Knowledge:

• Expert proficiency in XSLT, XML, and JSON; comfortable with Java sufficient for Workday Studio custom steps
• Deep working knowledge of the Business Process Framework and how events trigger integration flows
• Familiarity with Workday functional configuration across HCM, Benefits, Payroll, Security, and Time & Absence, sufficient to independently diagnose upstream data and process issues
• Strong foundational understanding of HR and payroll processes: hire-to-retire lifecycle, compensation and benefits administration, global compliance reporting, and how these processes generate the data that integrations carry

Security, Compliance & Engineering Practices:

• Strong knowledge of data security and compliance: PGP, SFTP, OAuth 2.0, SAML, WS-Security, PII handling
• Proven experience managing integrations across Workday's semi-annual release cycle, including impact assessment and sandbox testing
• Git-based version control and structured deployment and change management practices
• Demonstrated record as a technical leader who has shaped architecture decisions and raised engineering quality across a team
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to write clear IDDs and runbooks, and present technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment

Preferred

• Workday Pro Certification in Integrations (highly valued)
• Hands-on experience with Workday Extend (data models, UI pages, Extend APIs); accelerates ramp into the owned Extend scope
• Workday Pro Certification in Extend
• Hands-on experience with Workday Orchestrate; accelerates ramp into the owned Orchestrate scope
• Experience with Workday payroll interfaces (PECI, PICOF) and third-party payroll providers
• Experience with middleware or iPaaS platforms and the architectural judgment to know when middleware fits versus native Workday integration or Extend
• Experience supporting global, multi-country production environments
• Knowledge of GDPR, India PDPB, or SOC 2 compliance requirements in the context of HR data flows
• Experience integrating LLM-based tools, AI agents, or automation platforms with enterprise HR or business systems

Your Location:

This position is US - Remote Eligible. The role may include occasional work at an Airbnb office or attendance at offsites, as agreed to with your manager. While the position is Remote Eligible, you must live in a state where Airbnb, Inc. has a registered entity. Click here for the up-to-date list of excluded states. This list is continuously evolving, so please check back with us if the state you live in is on the exclusion list . If your position is employed by another Airbnb entity, your recruiter will inform you what states you are eligible to work from.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [email protected]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.