Workday Business Systems Analyst, People Systems
San Francisco, CAOperations & PeopleMid-levelFull-time
Role at a glance
Mid-level analyst to configure and optimize Workday HRIS for PATT and HCM domains on Anthropic's People team.
- →Configure Payroll, Absence, and Time Tracking domains
- →Own Core HCM data structures and security model
- →Design business processes with rules and validations
- →Troubleshoot configuration issues with Payroll team
- →Support security and data audits
Who should apply
Candidates with hands-on Workday configuration experience across payroll, absence, time tracking, and core HCM. They must demonstrate strong command of the Workday security model and business process design. Ideal applicants thrive in fast-paced environments, question standard approaches, and partner effectively across teams.
Skills & technologies
workday configurationpayrollabsence managementtime trackinghcmbusiness process designsecurity modelcalculated fields
Full job description
As published by Anthropic on their official careers page.
About Anthropic
Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.
About the role
Anthropic is seeking a talented and driven Workday Business Systems Analyst to join our People Systems team. You'll own the technical configuration, testing, and operational excellence of our Workday HRIS across two domains: PATT and HCM. Your deepest work will be on the PATT side, where you'll refine our existing payroll, absence, and time tracking configuration and shape PATT design decisions as they're made. On the HCM side, you'll own core HCM data structures, business process frameworks, and the security model that underpins everything we do in Workday. You'll be relied on as a system expert for both strategic guidance and hands-on delivery.
This role is about moving the team forward, not just keeping the system running. The right candidate is passionate about where AI and internal tooling can make People Systems more effective, and treats "the way it's always been done" as a starting point to question rather than a constraint.
We're looking for someone who is naturally curious and an exceptional problem solver — the kind of person who looks beyond the obvious or "standard" Workday answer and asks why before how. You'll find success in this role if you thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth environment and know how to reprioritize without losing rigor. You'll partner across many parts of the business, from the broader People team to Finance, IT, and beyond, to make sure our HRIS is secure, scalable, and a true business enabler.
Responsibilities
PATT and HCM
- Configure and maintain Payroll: pay components, earnings and deductions, pay groups, period schedules, and payroll-related business processes
- Configure and maintain Absence: time-off plans, accrual rules, eligibility criteria, and leave types
- Configure and maintain Time Tracking: time entry templates, validations, work schedules and calendars, and overtime calculations
- Configure and maintain Core HCM foundations: supervisory organizations, staffing models, job profiles and job/compensation structures, custom organizations, and worker data integrity
- Support annual and recurring People cycles in Workday, including compensation review setup, open enrollment configuration, and org restructures (mass supervisory org changes and job catalog updates)
- Design, build, and maintain business process definitions in both domains, including condition rules, calculated fields, custom validations, routing and approval logic, and notifications
- Partner with the Payroll team to troubleshoot configuration-driven payroll issues, including gross-to-net discrepancies, retro calculations, and off-cycle errors — the Payroll team owns processing; you own the configuration behind it
- Bring a strong command of the Workday security model: role-based, user-based, and intersection security groups, domain security policies, business process security policies, and integration system users (ISUs), with sound judgment about when to leverage each as you configure and troubleshoot across domains
- Support security and data audits in partnership with the broader team, using Workday delivered and custom audit reports to analyze access patterns, remediate exceptions, and uphold segregation of duties
- Perform impact analysis before changes ship, including how HCM and security changes ripple into payroll, absence, and time data
- Lead testing and adoption for Workday's twice-yearly releases across both domains: assess new features, run regression testing on critical business processes and security, and drive rollout of features we opt into
Across the platform
- Translate business requirements from our internal partners into scalable system design, and document configuration decisions as you go
- Build trusted relationships with partner teams, acting as a translator between technical configuration and business needs
- Support change management for system updates and new functionality: communicate what's changing and why, prepare documentation and enablement materials, and make sure changes land well with the people who use them
- Build and maintain advanced, matrix, and composite reports and dashboards; support mass data changes via EIB
- Configure alerts, scheduled reports, and report security so the right data reaches the right people automatically
- Triage and resolve day-to-day system issues, getting to root cause rather than patching symptoms
- Actively look for where AI and automation can strengthen how People Systems works, from testing, documentation, and requirements drafting to ticket triage and report generation, using Anthropic's own tools as part of your daily workflow
- Drive process automation and optimization opportunities with the broader People team and partner functions
Minimum Qualifications
- Have deep hands-on working knowledge of Workday Payroll, Absence, and Time Tracking (PATT) configuration and design, business process configuration, and Security
- Have hands-on working knowledge of Workday Core HCM
- Have worked in a fast-paced, high-growth environment and know how to flex between roles
- Possess strong technical skills including understanding of Workday architecture, security models, and integration methodologies
- Have experience with full lifecycle Workday implementations and/or significant module expansions
- Are intellectually curious, you ask "why" before "how," explore root causes rather than symptoms, and stay current on Workday and adjacent HR tech because you want to, not because you have to
- Approach problems with creativity, comfortable looking past the standard or obvious solution to find an answer that actually fits the business
- Treat HR data security and privacy as a non-negotiable foundation in everything you build and maintain
- Excel at building relationships and communicating effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels
- Are detail-oriented with strong documentation skills and a commitment to process excellence
- Have a track record of managing multiple competing priorities, with a bias toward flexibility and impact
- Have a collaborative mindset and willingness to pick up slack even if it goes outside your job description
Preferred Qualifications
- Have 7+ years of experience as a Workday Business Systems Analyst, with demonstrated expertise in system configuration, testing, and implementation
- Workday Pro accreditations or Workday partner certifications in HCM, Payroll, Absence, Time Tracking
- Understanding of Workday integrations: familiarity with Workday integration tools (EIB, Core Connectors including PECI/PICOF/DCoD, Workday Studio, SOAP/REST Web Services / RaaS), inbound vs. outbound patterns, authentication (SSO, SFTP, API keys / certs), typical HR integration partners (benefits providers, payroll, ATS, IdP, background check), and disciplined error handling, reconciliation, and monitoring
- Exposure to Workday Prism Analytics, Extend, or advanced reporting beyond standard report writer
- Experience applying AI tools to HRIS or People operations work, or strong interest in building that muscle
- Knowledge of complementary HR/Finance systems and integration patterns
- Understanding of data privacy regulations and security best practices
The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.
For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.
Annual Salary:
$205,000—$265,000 USD
Logistics
Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.
We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.
How we're different
We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.
The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.
Come work with us!
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.
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