Manager, People Systems Engineering (Remote Eligible)

Corporate Systems Engineering builds and operates the software platforms, integrations, and automations that power Smartsheet’s core business functions across Finance, Sales/GTM, and People & Culture. Our team owns mission-critical systems and workflows that enable how the company hires, sells, bills, pays, reports, and scales. We operate at the intersection of software engineering, enterprise platforms, and business-critical data, treating internal systems with the same rigor, reliability, and product mindset as customer-facing software.

People Systems Engineering owns and evolves the technology platforms that power the employee lifecycle at Smartsheet. The team is responsible for Workday, Docebo, Greenhouse, and the broader People technology ecosystem, supporting capabilities across recruiting, onboarding, core HR, compensation, learning, talent, and employee data. We combine deep enterprise-platform expertise with software engineering practices, using configuration, extensibility, APIs, integrations, automation, data, and AI to build reliable and scalable employee experiences.

As Manager, People Systems Engineering, you will lead the engineering team responsible for Smartsheet’s People technology ecosystem and define the long-term technical strategy for how employee technology evolves. Workday is a critical foundation of this ecosystem, but this role extends beyond operating individual applications: you will shape the architecture, engineering practices, data strategy, automation, and emerging AI capabilities that connect our People platforms into a cohesive technology ecosystem.

You will be expected to challenge existing approaches and identify opportunities to fundamentally improve how employee technology works - simplifying processes, reducing manual administration, improving employee and manager experiences, strengthening data and system architecture, and determining where configuration, software engineering, automation, or AI can provide better solutions.

You Will:

•  Own the technical strategy and long-term architecture for the People technology ecosystem, establishing a clear future state across Workday, Docebo, Greenhouse, integrations, employee data, automation, AI, and emerging capabilities
• Lead, coach, and develop the engineering team responsible for Smartsheet’s People platforms, creating a culture of technical ownership, experimentation, engineering rigor, and continuous improvement
• Serve as a technical leader for Workday, ensuring the platform remains well architected, maintainable, secure, scalable, and appropriately leveraged as a foundational system of record within the broader employee technology architecture
• Partner with the Product Manager for People Systems to translate employee and business problems into product and technical strategies, jointly shaping roadmaps while maintaining clear engineering ownership of architecture and implementation
• Continually evaluate the People technology landscape and challenge existing assumptions about how employee workflows should operate, identifying opportunities to simplify, consolidate, redesign, automate, or eliminate processes
• Define architectural boundaries across People platforms, determining which capabilities should live within Workday or other SaaS applications and where APIs, integrations, custom applications, automation, or AI provide better solutions
• Develop the technical strategy for People data, including authoritative sources, data models, system boundaries, data contracts, quality, lineage, access, lifecycle management, and reliable consumption by downstream systems
• Drive the evolution of People Systems toward an API-first and event-driven ecosystem where appropriate, reducing unnecessary point-to-point dependencies, manual data movement, and fragile integrations
• Define an AI and agentification strategy for employee technology, partnering with AI & Automation Engineering to identify where agents, conversational experiences, intelligent workflows, and AI-assisted processes can meaningfully improve employee and manager experiences
• Identify opportunities to move employee interactions away from navigating individual systems and toward simpler, intelligent experiences that orchestrate capabilities across the underlying People technology stack
• Establish a deliberate automation strategy across the employee lifecycle, reducing repetitive administration and manual handoffs across recruiting, onboarding, employee changes, compensation, learning, talent, and offboarding
• Introduce stronger software engineering practices into the People technology stack, including source control, peer review, CI/CD, environment management, observability, reusable components, documentation, and disciplined release practices where supported by the underlying platforms
• Establish a strategy for automated testing across People Systems, progressively reducing dependence on manual regression testing and improving confidence and speed as Workday and connected platforms change
• Define engineering standards for Workday configuration and extensibility, including when to use native configuration, Workday Studio, Workday Extend, APIs, integrations, automation, or external services
• Improve observability across critical employee workflows, integrations, scheduled processes, and data flows so failures and degradation can be identified proactively rather than through employee or business escalation
• Own the technical health of the People Systems portfolio, establishing mechanisms to identify and address architectural debt, fragile integrations, unnecessary customization, obsolete processes, platform limitations, and recurring operational issues
• Partner with Integration Engineering, AI & Automation, Data, Identity, Security, and other engineering teams to ensure People technology operates as part of a coherent enterprise architecture rather than as an isolated HR technology stack
• Evaluate emerging technologies and platform capabilities, separating meaningful opportunities from technology hype and developing pragmatic paths from experimentation to production
• Balance roadmap delivery with architectural modernization, platform reliability, technical debt, security, operational sustainability, and longer-term engineering investments
• Establish architecture reviews, technical standards, engineering metrics, and other mechanisms that raise the maturity of People Systems Engineering over time
• Communicate technical strategy, architecture decisions, investment needs, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to People & Culture, Product, Engineering, and senior leadership
• Recruit, onboard, mentor, and develop engineers with a combination of enterprise platform expertise, software engineering capability, systems thinking, and curiosity about the future of employee technology

You Have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of experience across enterprise application engineering, software engineering, HR technology, systems architecture, or related technical disciplines
• 2+ years of experience managing or formally leading technical teams, with demonstrated ability to develop both people and technical capability
• Strong hands-on technical understanding of Workday, including its architecture, data model, security model, business processes, integrations, reporting, and extensibility capabilities
• Demonstrated experience defining technical strategy or architecture, rather than solely managing application delivery, configuration, or support
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason across applications, integrations, APIs, data, identity, automation, infrastructure, and employee experiences as a connected architecture
• Experience determining appropriate boundaries between SaaS configuration, platform extensibility, integrations, automation, and custom software development
• Experience designing or evolving enterprise data architecture, including systems of record, data models, interfaces, data contracts, quality, governance, and downstream consumption
• Experience introducing modern software engineering practices into enterprise SaaS or business systems environments
• Experience with testing strategy and automation, CI/CD, observability, release engineering, or other practices that improve the reliability and velocity of enterprise application development
• Understanding of modern AI capabilities and the ability to identify practical applications of agents, LLMs, and intelligent automation within enterprise workflows
• Experience partnering with Product Managers to combine product strategy, customer needs, and technical strategy into coherent roadmaps and investment decisions
• Demonstrated ability to challenge legacy processes and architectures constructively and develop pragmatic modernization strategies rather than simply maintaining the existing environment
• Ability to operate across both strategic architecture and detailed technical discussions, including the credibility to challenge engineers, vendors, implementation partners, and business stakeholders
• Strong understanding of security, privacy, access control, auditability, and data protection considerations associated with sensitive employee data
• Excellent analytical, verbal, and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical strategies and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience with adjacent People platforms such as Docebo, Greenhouse, or similar technologies is a plus
• Experience with Workday Studio, Workday Extend, Workday APIs, cloud platforms, event-driven architectures, AI/agent platforms, or modern automation frameworks is a strong plus