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Workday

Large Enterprises

Screna has 10 Workday interview write-ups. The most reported round is the technical phone screen (4).

10 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Workday·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Workday software engineer interview with a meaty OOP design question about building a file parser system. The kind of problem where you think you know where it's going and then they keep pulling on threads.
  • Design a file parser system that supports multiple formats like CSV, JSON, XML, and custom delimited files. Walk through the class hierarchy, how you'd handle extensibility for new formats, and how you'd deal with large files and malformed input.

“I started with the interface and factory pattern which felt right, but I got tripped up when they pushed on how a brand new format gets added without touching existing code.”

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Workday·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Workday, one behavioral question about handling a challenge. Short and straightforward, nothing too surprising.
  • Tell me about a challenge you faced and how you overcame it.

“Pretty standard behavioral.”

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Workday·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Workday SWE interview that was basically one meaty coding problem with a follow-up that caught me off guard. The core question was manageable but the fuzzy matching extension is where things got interesting and honestly a bit painful.
  • Design a class that takes a body of text at construction time and supports a query method that returns all 0-indexed starting positions where a given keyword appears in the text.
  • Extend the query method to also return positions where the text matches the keyword with at most one edit (insertion, deletion, or substitution).

“The straightforward part.”

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Workday·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Got bounced from Workday after a coding round where I solved one of two medium-difficulty problems in 45 minutes. The second one I actually understood conceptually but couldn't translate the backtracking logic into working code fast enough, which is a brutal way to go out.
  • Solve a medium-difficulty algorithm problem using a sliding window approach within a timed coding session.
  • Solve a medium-difficulty algorithm problem that requires a backtracking approach within a timed coding session.

“This one I actually got.”

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Workday·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for an AI Engineer role at Workday and got rejected after a coding round with two medium-difficulty algorithm problems in 45 minutes. Solved one, explained the approach for the second but couldn't translate it into working code, which apparently was enough to kill the offer.
  • Solve two medium-difficulty algorithm problems within 45 minutes, one of which required a backtracking approach.

“The backtracking one wrecked me.”

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Workday·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Workday system design round, just one question but it took up the whole session. Not the most grueling interview but it made me realize how little I'd thought about randomness as an actual engineering problem.
  • How would you design a Pseudo Random Number Generator (PRNG)?

“I started with linear congruential generators because that's the first thing I remembered from school, but then they pushed on distribution quality and seed management and I kind of ran out of steam.”

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Workday·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Two behavioral questions for a software engineer role at Workday, pretty short segment overall. Nothing technically tricky but the ambiguity one required more thought than I expected.
  • Describe a time you made a mistake at work. What was the impact, how did you find out, and what did you do to fix it and keep it from happening again?
  • Tell me about a situation where you faced unclear or undefined requirements. How did you create clarity, what assumptions did you make explicit, and what came out of it?

“The fix and prevention part is where I think I undersold myself.”

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Workday·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Workday system design round, one big question about building a document upload and search platform with an AI extraction pipeline in the middle. Pretty dense for a single interview slot, they wanted the full picture from blob storage all the way to search ranking.
  • Design a system where users can upload documents and search them using both structured field queries and free-text keywords, with field extraction handled by a multi-step AI pipeline.

“This was a lot to cover in one question.”

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Workday·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Workday, got asked a pretty open-ended behavioral question about adding value. Not a lot to go on from the session itself but it felt like a standard culture/contribution screen.
  • Can you describe an idea you came up with that created real value for an organization you worked at?

“I went with a concrete example from a past role where I pushed for a process change that cut down turnaround time on a recurring workflow.”

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Workday·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Workday, got a behavioral question about managing teams with mixed backgrounds. Pretty short interaction, not much else to report.
  • How do you manage a team that has people coming from very different professional or cultural backgrounds?

“I fumbled the opener a bit and went straight into a generic answer about communication styles.”

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