Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

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

The role builds and runs custom agents on the Workday Agent Harness; creates agents, apps, and orchestrations using Developer Agent; connects agents to governed Agent-Ready Tools and to other agents and work environments through open standards and REST APIs; and works with platform capabilities that provide governance. The engineer partners with senior FDEs, AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads to support customer outcomes and develop expertise in enterprise agent engineering.

The Developer Platform FDE team works at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution. It deploys agents and apps using the same infrastructure Workday uses internally, while turning field insights, recurring customer friction, and proven patterns into scalable capabilities for developers building on Workday. Workday Services owns customer projects; this role owns defined technical workstreams and helps guide them through structured milestones within standard six-month deployment cycles.

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 through professional, academic, or personal projects, such as tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or agent orchestration.
• 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 thrive in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales.
• Collaborative, low-ego team player who learns quickly and works well within multidisciplinary account and delivery pods.
• Curiosity about why problems happen and ability to recognize when a customer issue points to 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 in 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 hands-on; document bugs, edge-case failures, and friction points with reproduction steps and context, and share findings with Developer, AI, and Integration Platform product teams.
• Identify recurring deployment challenges and contribute fixes, reusable components, sample code, and documentation to 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 delivery through structured milestones from kickoff to graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.
• Work across the customer deployment lifecycle alongside senior FDEs, AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads.
• Travel to customer sites as needed, up to 20%.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Workday comprehensive benefits are referenced, but specific benefits are not listed in the description.
• Flexible scheduling through Workday Flex Work, with at least 50% of time each quarter in the office or in the field with customers, prospects, and partners, depending on the role.

What This Job Offers

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