Workday Systems Engineer - Absence & Time Tracking

Digital Enterprise Technology is looking for an experienced Workday techno-functional Systems Engineer to design and deliver scalable solutions across Workday Absence and Time Tracking. This role will join a product and techno-functional team supporting Salesforce's Global Employee Success organization. The ideal candidate thrives in a dynamic, high-growth environment and brings deep expertise in business analysis, Workday Absence and Time Tracking, and key touchpoints with Payroll, HCM, Benefits, and Financials. As the techno-functional owner for this domain, the Systems Engineer translates business needs into detailed requirements, configuration designs, test strategies, and reliable production solutions, independently leading complex features and releases through post-production validation. This is a hands on configuration and delivery role focused on accurate and compliant.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical owner for Workday Absence and Time Tracking.
• Lead requirements elaboration sessions with Product Management, Payroll, HR Operations, Employee Relations, Benefits, Compliance, and other stakeholders.
• Translate business use cases into detailed functional and technical requirements, including user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, validation rules, and configuration specifications.
• Design, configure, test, and maintain time off plans, leave rules, accruals, eligibility rules, time entry processes, work schedules, validations, calculations, and related business processes.
• Partner with Product Management on prioritization, backlog refinement, sequencing, and delivery tradeoffs.
• Identify policy, process, security, integration, reporting, and payroll dependencies; provide estimates and surface delivery risks before development begins.
• Evaluate solution options, make documented configuration tradeoffs, and maintain design decisions, operating procedures, and support documentation.
• Assess how absence and time configurations affect payroll calculations, payroll inputs, retroactivity, pay periods, cutoffs, and downstream processing.
• Partner with Payroll to validate time calculation outputs, paid and unpaid leave treatment, eligibility, balances, reconciliation, and payroll impacting changes.
• Define and execute functional, regression, integration, end to end and payroll impact testing.
• Coordinate Workday release impact assessments, production deployments, smoke testing, and post deployment validation.
• Lead technical triage and root cause analysis for complex production issues and time sensitive payroll incidents.
• Execute applicable SOX, audit, access, security, segregation of duties, and change management controls.
• Coordinate with integration and software engineers when changes require custom integrations, services, or coded solutions.
• Identify and implement opportunities to automate testing, reconciliation, monitoring, and repetitive support activities.
• Leverage approved AI assisted tools to improve requirements analysis, solution design, configuration, testing, documentation, and troubleshooting while maintaining security, privacy, and quality standards.

Required skill

• 5+ years of hands on experience configuring Workday Absence and Time Tracking.
• Strong understanding of absence plans, accruals, eligibility, leave administration, time entry, work schedules, time calculations, validations, and business processes.
• Practical payroll experience, including understanding how time and absence data affect gross to net processing, retroactivity, payroll calendars, cutoffs, reconciliation, and controls.
• Experience translating business requirements into scalable Workday configurations and detailed acceptance criteria.
• Experience leading testing, UAT, production deployments, and post production validation.
• Understanding of Workday security, reporting, calculated fields, data structures, and integration dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex production issues and perform structured root cause analysis.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to lead work independently across multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.
• Ability to manage multiple customers, projects, and tasks simultaneously while meeting deadlines in a fast paced environment.
• Ability to present complex ideas clearly and concisely to non technical audiences.
• Demonstrated success collaborating as a team player across virtual, global, and cross functional teams.
• Excellent interpersonal, influencing, and negotiation skills when working with cross functional stakeholders.

Desired skills:

• Workday certification, Workday Pro accreditation, or advanced training in Absence, Time Tracking, Payroll, or related HCM areas.
• Experience with multiple countries, complex leave policies, hourly populations, shift workers, or varied payroll schedules.
• Familiarity with Workday integrations, EIBs, APIs, Studio, Extend, or middleware platforms.
• Experience with SOX controls, audits, payroll compliance, and sensitive employee data.
• Experience automating regression testing, operational monitoring, reconciliation, or support processes.