Workday Functional Architect

Responsibilities

• Serve as the highest-level internal Workday authority across Core HCM, Compensation, Advanced Compensation, Recruiting, Talent, Learning, Benefits, US Payroll, Onboarding, People Analytics, Workday Help, and Peakon.
• Lead solution design for complex, cross-module, and enterprise-wide requirements that span multiple Port Cos, geographies, or functional domains.
• Define and govern configuration standards, design patterns, naming conventions, and architectural guardrails across the Workday tenant.
• Evaluate trade-offs between configuration, custom reporting, and integration approaches — making and documenting architectural decisions with clear rationale.
• Provide expert guidance on Workday's evolving product roadmap and assess the impact of bi-annual releases on the tenant architecture.
• Act as the primary escalation resource for Product Owners when requirements exceed module-level complexity or require cross-domain coordination.
• Design scalable solutions that can be deployed across multiple Port Cos without sacrificing the ability to accommodate entity-specific variation.
• Partner with HR leaders, Finance, Legal, and Compliance teams to translate business requirements into Workday architecture that is both technically sound and strategically aligned.
• Lead discovery and design workshops with Port Co stakeholders for high-complexity initiatives, new product rollouts, or structural changes.
• Closely partner with IT team to oversee integration architecture between Workday and third-party systems including but not limited to payroll providers, benefits carriers, and analytics platforms.
• Ensure data governance principles are embedded into platform design, with attention to data lineage, tenant configuration, and reporting structures.
• Conduct periodic platform audits to identify configuration drift, unused functionality, or compliance gaps.
• Champion Workday best practices and ensure the team remains current with Workday Community, certification updates, and product innovations.

• 10+ years of Workday functional experience, with deep hands‑on expertise across a minimum of five Workday modules.
• Demonstrated experience as a lead architect or senior consultant on complex, multi-entity or global Workday implementations.
• Strong command of Workday business process framework, security model, reporting and calculated fields.
• Proven experience solutioning across Core HCM, Compensation, Recruiting, Payroll, and at least two additional modules.
• Experience with Workday integration technologies.
• Exceptional ability to translate ambiguous, complex business requirements into clear, scalable Workday solutions.
• Experience operating in a federated, multi-entity, or shared‑services model — ideally across a portfolio of companies.
• Strong executive communication skills — able to present architectural recommendations clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Workday Pro certification(s) in one or more modules strongly preferred but not necessary.
• Prior experience in consulting and Workday partner ecosystem is a plus.

• Workday Pro certification