Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Forward Deployed Engineer on Workday’s Developer Platform Forward Deployed Engineering team bridges hands-on agent engineering with customer technical strategy. The role leads complex, ambiguous enterprise customer builds, partnering with customers—often their executives—to architect, build, deploy, debug, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic applications in live customer environments.

The engineer works across Workday’s Developer Platform, using the Workday Agent Harness, Developer Agent, agentic tools, ADKs, and agent frameworks. The role enables agents to securely access HR and finance data and actions through Agent-Ready Tools over MCP, connect through A2A, and reach users in Workday, Sana, and other AI tools. In collaboration with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, Workday Services leads, and other FDEs, the engineer takes customer agents from discovery through production and measurable business outcomes.

The position also helps shape the technical direction of custom agent development on Workday. It turns field-tested solutions and customer feedback into scalable product capabilities, reference architectures, playbooks, and evaluation approaches, and provides technical leadership and mentorship. Workday Services owns the customer project; this role owns the technical agent-development workstream and the product insight it produces.

Requirements

• At least 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, such as 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 approach, with experience mentoring engineers and helping multidisciplinary account and delivery teams work effectively.

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, and evaluation.
• Experience building or consuming Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Agent2Agent (A2A) multi-agent systems.
• Experience building on the Workday platform, including Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday Integrations.
• Working knowledge of Workday business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and customer implementation and governance practices.
• 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 of 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 for enterprise problems using live 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 specific feedback that improves Workday’s developer toolkit.
• Synthesize field telemetry, edge-case failures, and recurring customer friction into product insights that inform the roadmap and engineering backlog.
• Identify reusable best practices and turn custom fixes into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box capabilities, reference architectures, playbooks, and evaluation approaches.
• Collaborate with FDEs across Workday AI product areas to deliver complete agentic systems, including integrations with first-party agents, Sana, A2A, and Data Cloud.
• Serve as technical lead for the pod, shape the product-improvement thesis at engagement kickoff, and evaluate it at exit.
• Guide engagements through structured milestones toward graduation within standard six-month deployment cycles.
• Coach other 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 or bonus.
• May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
• Flexible work approach combining in-person time with remote work.

What This Job Offers

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