Staff Workday Engineer, People Systems & AI Automation at BetterUp
Austin, TX
$151,000–$189,000
Jul 16, 2026
Austin, TX
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role serving as the primary technical owner of Workday and the surrounding HR systems landscape. Day-to-day work covers Workday configuration, security, integrations (EIB and API-based), release management, and SOX compliance, alongside defining and driving an AI and automation roadmap across the HR tech stack. The role suits a seasoned Workday specialist comfortable operating independently, influencing VP-level stakeholders, and mentoring other practitioners.
Senior level · 12+ years · Remote · Full-time
Advertised as Staff, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 120 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer occupations, all other). range 25–180
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $119,144 (middle half $81,115–$160,963).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting is titled 'Staff/Lead Workday Engineer' and explicitly frames this as a Staff/Lead-level role, so advertised seniority is set to Staff. However, the actual scope — deep individual-contributor ownership of a single platform (Workday) within one company's People team, with no evidence of setting direction across multiple teams or org-wide technical authority — is consistent with a Senior engineer. The 12-year minimum and 'wide latitude' language are ordinary for a Senior specialist role, not a true Staff-level scope.
SOC classification is a genuine judgement call. This role is primarily an enterprise HRIS specialist (Workday configuration, integrations, and AI enablement) — it does not fit cleanly into any single 15-12xx code. 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other) is the best fit for a dedicated HRIS/Workday engineer; 15-1211 (Computer Systems Analysts) is the closest runner-up given the systems analysis, integration architecture, and cross-functional advisory work.
Workday AI capabilities (Workday Assistant, Illuminate, Extend, Orchestrate) are listed under the requirements section but framed with 'working knowledge of… or demonstrated ability to master new Workday capabilities quickly,' making them partially substitutable. They are marked preferred to reflect that the JD explicitly accepts demonstrated learning ability as an alternative.
Third-party HR tools (Ashby, Pave, Shareworks, Athena, HC 365) are explicitly called out as 'a plus' in the requirements section, so they are marked preferred.
No compensation figures are stated in the posting.
The caller has declared this a fully-remote role; the posting itself describes a hybrid expectation (2 days/week in Austin, NYC, SF, or Arlington VA hubs), but remote=true has been set per caller instruction and no metro is inferred.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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