Workday DevOps / SRE Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you noticed that your infrastructure or tooling was creating barriers for underrepresented engineers on your team. What did you do about it?

2.Describe a time you had to design monitoring or alerting systems for a complex, multi-layered application architecture. How did you think about organizing the different components and their relationships?

3.Tell me about a time you had to design infrastructure components that model complex business relationships. What domain were you working with, and how did you think about the object hierarchy?

4.Describe a time you had to lead an infrastructure project that required close collaboration with product, security, and customer success teams. How did you keep everyone aligned when priorities conflicted?

5.Walk me through a time when you had to ensure zero downtime for a system that processes critical business operations. What was at stake, and what specific steps did you take?

6.Walk me through a situation where customer feedback revealed that your infrastructure was causing performance issues for their critical business processes. How did you respond and what did you learn?

7.You're troubleshooting a Kubernetes cluster where payroll processing jobs are failing intermittently. The logs show resource constraints but CPU and memory metrics look normal. How would you investigate this?

8.You're implementing infrastructure automation that will be used by engineering teams across HCM, Financial Management, and Planning products. How do you ensure it works well for all teams while avoiding complexity?

9.Our MongoDB clusters supporting HCM data are experiencing slow queries during month-end reporting periods. You have read replicas but they're not helping. What's your approach?

10.You need to deploy a new version of the financial management service across our multi-region AWS infrastructure. The deployment must be zero-downtime and rollback-ready. Walk me through your strategy.

11.We're seeing memory leaks in our Xpresso application servers that seem to correlate with certain customer usage patterns. How would you approach diagnosing and fixing this?

12.Design a CI/CD pipeline for Workday Extend applications that ensures customer-built apps don't impact the core platform while maintaining fast deployment cycles.

13.Tell me about a time you had to influence engineering teams from different product areas to adopt a new infrastructure standard or practice. How did you approach getting buy-in from teams you didn't manage?

14.Tell me about a time you inherited a team or system with serious reliability issues that were impacting customer operations. How did you approach both the immediate crisis and building long-term team capabilities?

15.Describe a time you had to make an infrastructure decision that would impact multiple customer tenants differently. How did you balance competing needs while maintaining platform integrity?

16.Walk me through a time when you noticed that your infrastructure tooling or processes were creating barriers for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds. How did you identify the issue and what leadership role did you take?

17.Tell me about a time you had to lead your team through a significant architectural change that would take months to complete. How did you maintain team momentum and morale during the transition?

18.Describe a situation where you had to convince senior leadership to invest in infrastructure work that wouldn't have visible customer impact for several quarters. How did you build the business case and maintain support?

19.Our multi-tenant application platform is serving 11,000+ enterprise customers, and we need to estimate the storage costs if we start retaining payroll audit logs for 10 years instead of 7. Walk me through how you'd calculate the financial impact.

20.You're looking at CPU utilization graphs for our Xpresso application servers and notice they spike to 90% every day at 9am PST but stay under 30% most other times. How would you investigate what's causing this pattern?

21.We're planning to migrate our Financial Management product from AWS to a hybrid multi-cloud setup. Estimate how many customer migrations we could complete per quarter while maintaining zero downtime for payroll processing.

22.Our Kubernetes clusters running HCM workloads are experiencing 20% higher network traffic than normal, but application logs show normal request volumes. How would you systematically diagnose where this extra traffic is coming from?

23.Workday Illuminate AI features are being used by 60% of our HCM customers, but we're seeing inconsistent response times across tenants. Some customers get sub-second responses while others wait 10+ seconds for the same AI operations. How would you approach this performance disparity?

24.A major Workday customer is planning to acquire another company and needs to merge 50,000 employee records from a competitor's HR system into our HCM platform within 90 days. Estimate the infrastructure capacity and engineering effort this integration would require.