Staff Workday Integration Engineer

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

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