Senior Specialist, Workday Security & Governance (People Systems)

Job description

We are on the lookout for a Senior Specialist - Workday Security & Governance to join the People Systems team and take ownership of our Workday security landscape, governance, and best practices. Join our 30+ strong People Technology (Workday) team, working across functional, integrations & AI teams to deliver and continuously improve our global Workday landscape. You will collaborate closely with product teams & CoEs owning areas such as Talent Acquisition, Talent, Total Rewards, People Operations Excellence, Data, and other People Technology capabilities.

Together, we partner with business and People teams across the organisation to build secure, scalable, and innovative solutions that enable our people and processes globally. Own and continuously improve Workday Security and Governance, ensuring a secure, scalable, compliant, and well-governed environment across modules, countries, and business areas, while driving security standards, governance processes, and best practices.

Design, configure, and maintain Workday security, including roles, security groups, domains, business process security, and Intersection Security, applying least-privilege principles and challenging inappropriate access requirements. Conduct periodic security and access reviews, proactively identifying and remediating excessive access, security risks, and control gaps before they become incidents or audit findings. Act as the Workday Security SME for internal and external audits, ensuring controls, documentation, and evidence are audit-ready, while owning security remediation and release impact assessments across security roles, business processes, reporting, and access.

Partner with Workday functional, technical, and business teams to design secure, scalable solutions that meet business needs while following best practices and leveraging Workday's out-of-the-box capabilities. Provide security governance and best-practice guidance for Workday integrations, APIs, and service accounts, partnering with the Integrations team on implementation and providing hands-on execution and remediation where required.

Build and maintain security reports and dashboards and use Google Apps Script and other automation approaches to simplify reporting, improve visibility into access and risks, and make security insights easier to understand and act on. Drive continuous improvement, innovation, and cross-functional alignment across People Systems, HR, Information Security, Audit, Compliance, and functional teams, translating complex security concepts into practical, scalable solutions for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

8+ years of hands-on Workday experience, with strong expertise across Workday HCM, Security, business processes, Reporting and calculated fields. Deep expertise in Workday Security, including Security Groups, Domains, Business Process Security, Intersection Security, access controls and least-privilege principles. Experience designing and driving Workday security governance, including periodic access reviews, risk identification, audit readiness, evidence preparation, remediation and sustainable control improvements.

Strong understanding of Workday integrations, APIs, service accounts and release management, including assessing security/access impacts and defining best practices. Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex security models, challenge requirements when needed, and balance security, compliance, business needs and Workday best practices. Proactive, ownership-driven and innovative mindset, with the ability to independently identify risks and opportunities, drive scalable improvements, and leverage automation tools such as Google Apps Script or similar solutions to simplify and improve processes.