Job Description
This role is hybrid, 3 days per week in our offices at Parkwest Business Park, Dublin.
The Opportunity
We are looking for an experienced Principal Engineer to lead and shape our Platform Technologies team, Foundation. This role is critical to building and maintaining the core technical infrastructure that powers Workhuman's entire engineering organization. You'll be responsible for the foundational platform technologies that enable 300+ engineers to build reliable, observable, and highly performant distributed systems.
Current Major Initiatives
Kafka Migration Program - Continue to support the enterprise-wide migration from ActiveMQ to Kafka, which involved removing distributed XA transactions and replacing with outbox pattern, establishing Schema Registry governance, and creating Kafka observability frameworks.
Unified Observability Platform - Architect OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation for all services, centralised configuration with ADOT collectors, integration with Managed Prometheus and X‑Ray, unified Grafana dashboards, cost‑efficient architecture operating below commercial SaaS alternatives.
Service Communication Standards - Establish Edge Authentication Lambda for token translation, header propagation libraries for distributed correlation, W3C trace context integration, and standards that make secure, traceable communication the default.
Tech Stack
Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Schema Registry, OpenTelemetry, ADOT, Amazon Managed Prometheus, AWS X‑Ray, CloudWatch, Grafana, Java 8/17, Spring Boot, Microservices, RESTful APIs, ECS Fargate, API Gateway, Lambda, Terraform, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, Oracle DB, PostgreSQL, NoSQL.
What We Can Offer You
Architect and build Workhuman's entire observability strategy using OpenTelemetry, ADOT, AWS X‑Ray, and Managed Prometheus - creating a unified platform for metrics, traces, and logs across all AWS accounts.
Continue the enterprise-wide migration from ActiveMQ to Apache Kafka, establishing event‑driven architecture standards across 300+ engineers.
Design service‑to‑service communication patterns, authentication systems (Edge Auth Lambda), and distributed tracing standards using W3C trace context.
Solve the hardest, lowest‑level platform problems that enable teams to focus on business value without thinking about infrastructure complexity.
Work with architects and senior engineers to shape platform architecture and establish standards that the entire engineering organisation depends on.
Make complex platform capabilities simple and accessible through excellent developer experience and robust frameworks.
The Skills You Will Bring
10+ years in enterprise Java development with Spring, microservices, distributed systems and AWS.
Deep expertise in event‑driven architectures, message‑oriented middleware (Apache Kafka), and patterns like outbox, saga, and eventual consistency.
Experience with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, distributed tracing, and observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch).
Proven ability to balance cost, performance, and visibility in large‑scale platform systems.
Skilled communicator who can translate complex platform concepts into simple, understandable patterns for engineers.
Achievements
Created libraries, frameworks, or standards that simplify complex platform capabilities while maintaining security and governance.
Successfully influenced technical direction and elevated the capabilities of teams around you.
Successfully migrated enterprise applications from legacy systems to modern architectures at scale.
The Company
At Workhuman® our mission is to bring more humanity to the workplace. We recognise and embrace individuals’ differences and believe that workforce diversity and inclusion are essential to our long‑term growth and success. Even if you don’t think you “check every single box” above, please still consider applying. We’re looking for a human who is collaborative, innovative with a growth mindset.
We love what we do because we’re shaping the future of work through our people and our technology. Our human cloud‑based applications are helping some of the world’s leading global brands connect culture to shared purpose. The Workhuman Cloud empowers employees to thank, talk and celebrate each other, creating an environment that sparks gratitude and human connection while increasing employee engagement and productivity.
We were named as #5 Best Workplace in the Great Place to Work Awards in Ireland in 2022 in the large‑sized workplace category. We were also recognised as the Best Workplace for Women and the Best Workplace in Technology in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
In 2021 we were named as #2 Best Workplace in Europe in the medium‑sized workplace category.
We were also recognised as #2 Best Large Places to Work in Boston by Built In for 2023 as well as the Best Place to Work in Boston, U.S. Best Large Places to Work, and U.S. Best Places to Work.
There are currently over 7.5 million users on the Workhuman® cloud across 180 countries.
Our core values are Respect, Determination, Innovation, and Imagination.
Workhuman is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees. We proudly provide a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Employment decisions at Workhuman are based solely on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Workhuman believes that diversity and inclusion among our teammates is critical to our success as a global company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.
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