Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

3d • $123,900 - $222,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Engineer on Workday’s Developer Platform FDE team combines hands-on agent engineering with direct customer work. Working alongside senior FDEs, the engineer helps enterprise customers build, deploy, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic apps in live customer environments, across the full deployment lifecycle.

The role uses the Workday Developer Platform stack, including the Workday Agent Harness, Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, and governance capabilities such as Workday Extend AI, Agent System of Record, Agent Passport, and Workday Data Cloud. It involves connecting agents using standards such as MCP, A2A, and A2UI, as well as REST APIs, and building with agent development kits and frameworks.

The engineer works with senior FDEs, AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, Workday Services leads, and other teams to support customer success and improve the platform. Customer engagements follow structured milestones from kickoff to graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles; Workday Services owns the customer project. The position is based in a flexible-work model, with at least half of each quarter spent in the office or in the field with customers, prospects, or partners, depending on the role. Travel to customer sites may be required up to 20%.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems, such as tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or agent orchestration; experience may come from professional, academic, or personal projects.
• Hands-on coding and debugging skills, for example in Python, Java, or a similar language.
• Working understanding of REST APIs, object-oriented design, and integration patterns.
• Experience working directly with customers or business stakeholders on technical deployments, troubleshooting, or integrations.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.
• Strong verbal and written technical communication skills, including the ability to explain technical issues to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work effectively in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales.
• Collaborative, low-ego team approach, with the ability to learn quickly and work in multidisciplinary account and delivery pods.
• Curiosity about why problems happen and ability to recognize when an individual customer issue may indicate a broader product need.

Nice To Haves

• Working knowledge of Workday, including business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, or integrations.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent2Agent (A2A), including building or consuming MCP servers.
• Experience with one or more agent development kits or orchestration frameworks.
• Familiarity with evaluating and testing LLM-powered systems.
• Experience with Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday Integrations.
• Open-source contributions, side projects, or hackathon work involving AI agents or developer tooling.

Responsibilities

• Build, configure, test, and debug custom AI agents and agentic apps inside live enterprise tenants, working with live data, business processes, and security configurations.
• Participate in technical discovery sessions with customer stakeholders and help translate business requirements into product configurations, proofs of concept, and integration specifications.
• Use Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, and the Agent Harness, documenting bugs, edge-case failures, and friction points with reproduction steps and context for product teams.
• Identify recurring deployment challenges and contribute fixes, reusable components, sample code, documentation, reference architectures, playbooks, and pattern guidance.
• Collaborate with FDEs across first-party agents, Sana, Data Cloud, and Deployment AI to deliver complete agentic systems.
• Own defined technical workstreams within customer engagements and help guide engagements through milestones from kickoff to graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Workday states that it offers comprehensive benefits, but specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed