Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

1d • $173,300 - $309,600 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer is part of Workday’s Developer Platform Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, which works across Product, Engineering, and customer execution for Workday AI products. The team partners with enterprise customers to build custom AI agents and agentic applications on Workday, addressing complex real-world data, configuration, workflow, and deployment challenges. It also channels customer feedback and field-tested solutions to Product and Engineering to improve Workday’s developer platform and create scalable capabilities for the broader developer ecosystem.

In this role, you will lead the technical strategy and hands-on development for complex, ambiguous customer engagements. You will work with enterprise customers, including senior executives, to architect, build, deploy, debug, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic applications in live environments. You will use Workday’s Developer Platform, Agent Harness, Developer Agent, agentic tools and frameworks, Agent-Ready Tools over MCP, and A2A connections. You will help connect agents to HR and finance data and actions and make them available through Workday, Sana, and other AI tools.

You will work throughout the deployment lifecycle with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, Workday Services leads, and other FDEs, moving customer agents from initial concept to production. You will also shape technical direction, turn field insights into product capabilities and reusable guidance, and mentor other engineers. Workday Services owns the customer project; this role owns the technical agent-development workstream and the product insight it produces. Engagements are guided through structured milestones toward graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development.
• Experience leading complex, high-stakes enterprise technical engagements.
• Hands-on coding and debugging skills in Python, Java, or a similar language.
• Deep knowledge of REST APIs, object-oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.
• Demonstrated experience working directly with enterprise executives on complex software deployments, live-data troubleshooting, and custom workflow integration as a trusted technical advisor.
• Ability to abstract durable, generalizable product requirements from individual customer issues and use field insights to influence product development.
• Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical challenges to non-technical leaders.
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales.
• Collaborative, low-ego leadership and mentoring skills, including helping multidisciplinary account and delivery teams work effectively together.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agentic systems, including tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agent orchestration, evaluation, and building or consuming MCP servers and A2A multi-agent systems.
• Experience building on the Workday platform, including Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday Integrations, and working knowledge of business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and Workday implementation and governance.
• Experience designing agent evaluations, observability, and guardrails, including addressing prompt injection, tool misuse, and least-privilege access.
• Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or platforms, and understanding what makes a strong developer experience.
• Contributions to open-source or community-based projects and libraries.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, deploy, and debug custom AI agents and agentic applications against live customer data, business processes, and security configurations.
• Lead technical discovery with senior customer leaders and translate ambiguous business requirements into enterprise-grade product builds.
• Partner with Product and Engineering teams to provide detailed feedback on the developer toolkit and influence the product roadmap and engineering backlog using field telemetry, failures, and recurring customer friction.
• Identify reusable best practices and patterns, and lead efforts to turn custom solutions into standardized product capabilities, reference architectures, playbooks, and evaluation approaches.
• Collaborate with FDEs across Workday AI product areas to deliver integrated agentic systems, including connecting custom agents with Workday first-party agents, Sana, A2A, and Data Cloud.
• Serve as the technical lead for a pod, shape product-improvement goals at engagement kickoff, assess results at exit, and guide engagements through milestones toward graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.
• Coach and mentor FDEs in agent engineering and customer engagement.
• Own the technical agent-development workstream and resulting product insights while Workday Services owns the customer project.

Benefits

• May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Workday describes a comprehensive benefits package; specific benefits are not listed in the posting.
• Flexible work arrangement combining in-person time and remote work.

What This Job Offers

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