In summary - "Academics" should not waste their time here. I was contacted by one of their recruiters based on my sys ops background and experience. Over a period of a month I had 4 telephone screening interviews/conversations. I was then invited to a series of face-to-face interviews (5 hours -- 6 sub-panels with a total of 8 people + a HR person). There interviewers were nice and there was nothing particularly difficult with the set of questions -- all very conversational. The range of topic included a recap of my background and experience, project and team management, operations & sys admin, Cloud, DevOps, Networking etc. So far so good. After a week I was contacted with the news that although they considered me to be technically excellent, they were not going to proceed any further because my background was too "academic" -- I have published papers on system architectures & DevOps and have professionally worked on complex large-scale distributed computing infrastructures. Given that Workday were well aware of my "academic" background, I feel they have wasted a good chunk of my time that I could have used productively elsewhere. There is also an inference that an "academic" is not capable of adjusting to a commercial environment. Personally, I always considered myself a to be a professional sys admin, and I managed my infrastructures accordingly.