Celebrating Diversity in Our New Office in Dublin

Here’s a good puzzle: What do horse fairs, a law library, crypts with mummies, a center for the homeless, fruit markets, and  Ireland’s Four Courts have in common? All of these things can be found within 500 meters of Workday’s new European headquarters office in Dublin.

Today, we’re delighted to announce the opening of our new office in the King’s Building on May Lane. It is located in the heart of the north inner city, and the most culturally diverse part of Ireland. In addition to the range of facilities mentioned above, there’s great diversity in people—many of the residents here were not born in Ireland.

Diversity is one of the critical ingredients for innovation: Differences of opinion, background, and skills lead to better decision making and business outcomes. Our Dublin office employs people from more than 30 different countries in Europe and beyond.

Yet there is more to diversity than just geography. Our Dublin-based developers use a wide range of technologies: from Akka to Xpresso, Ant to Yarn, Basho to Spark, Hadoop to Zookeeper. This isn’t technology buzzword bingo—it’s a reflection of the fact that we need to enlist the assistance of the latest (and most cutting edge) technologies available, wielded by people skilled in them, to solve the complex challenges and opportunities in rapidly scaling and managing enterprise applications in the cloud.

Beyond technology, this year has seen a significant change in the nature of the development work we do here in Dublin. Since Workday made the city its European headquarters following the 2008 acquisition of Cape Clear, we have primarily been involved in the build-out of Workday’s underlying technology platform. A good example of this kind of work is our pivotal contribution to Workday’s zero downtime initiative.

However, this year we kicked off a project to build a major Workday application: Workday Learning, announced on 29 September at Workday Rising. Extending the European team’s product development capabilities beyond systems and infrastructure engineering out to application development is a significant step, and rounds out the diverse skillsets needed to fully support Workday’s global expansion.

Although many of Dublin’s technology companies are to be found either in industrial parks outside the city center, or down by Dublin’s redeveloped Dockland, we chose to locate in this part of the city for three reasons:

1. King’s Building is an amazing place in a great location, and we knew we could turn it into a terrific and fun place to work.
2. We mapped out where our employees live and determined this location was central for most, thereby shortening their commutes.
3. We were attracted to this vibrant and diverse part of Dublin and believe we can enrich our work experience by giving back to the local community. (Our Dublin employees take the Workday Foundation goals to heart, from teaching kids to read to helping make Dublin a GREENer capital.)

We needed this much bigger space in King’s Building: We announced plans in June 2014 to create 200 new positions in Ireland, and we’ve now reached that goal. And today, we announced we’re creating another 200 new jobs in Ireland for skilled developers over the next three years.

The sum of all these diverse parts—cultures, technologies, work projects, and community—collectively help make Workday a fantastic experience for our employees, who in turn make Workday a fantastic experience for our customers.

So, if you’re a Java genius, a Scala specialist, a big data demon, or simply a superlative software developer, check out our career site.  There may be an opportunity for you here in this wonderfully diverse mix of people that come together to make Workday.