Principal Forward Deployed Engineer
About The Position
The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer bridges hands-on software development with customer technical strategy, leading complex and ambiguous enterprise engagements involving Workday AI agents and developer platform solutions. The role partners with enterprise customers, often at the executive level, to architect, deploy, debug, and optimize solutions in live customer environments. Working across the deployment lifecycle with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads, the engineer resolves technical issues, develops lightweight integrations, and translates field experience into scalable product capabilities. The role also helps set the technical direction of the Forward Deployed Engineering practice and mentors other engineers. Engagements are owned from kickoff through graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development, including leading complex, high-stakes enterprise technical engagements.
- Hands-on coding and debugging skills, such as Python, Java, or similar.
- Deep knowledge of REST APIs, object-oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns.
- Working knowledge of Workday business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, integrations, and customer implementation and governance.
- 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.
- Ability to derive 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 approach, with experience mentoring engineers and helping multidisciplinary teams work effectively.
Nice To Haves
- Applied experience with LLM-powered or agentic AI systems, such as prompt or context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, or agent orchestration frameworks.
- Working understanding of how model behavior can surface as product and customer-facing issues.
Responsibilities
- Architect, deploy, configure, and debug AI agents and integrations in complex live enterprise tenant environments.
- Lead technical discovery with senior customer leaders and translate ambiguous business requirements into product configurations, proofs of concept, and integration specifications.
- Synthesize field telemetry, edge-case failures, and recurring customer friction into insights that inform the product roadmap and engineering backlog.
- Identify patterns across customer engagements and lead efforts to turn custom solutions into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box product capabilities.
- Advise Workday Services leads, AI Deployment Architects, Account Teams, and customer executives as a trusted technical partner.
- Own strategically important or technically complex engagements from kickoff through graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.
- Coach and mentor other Forward Deployed Engineers on technical approaches and customer engagement.
Benefits
- May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission or bonus.
- May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
- Flexible work approach combining in-person time and remote work.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
