Principal Partner AI Architect

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

12d•$138,600 - $243,200•Hybrid

About The Position

The Partner AI Experience team is Workday’s dedicated investment in accelerating our most strategic GSI and Ecosystem partnerships. Working alongside the Global Partner Organization (GPO), this team serves as the technical, functional, and quantitative experts, providing the enablement infrastructure, product intelligence, and go-to-market support that allows our partners to build and sell Workday AI with confidence and speed. Each pod is aligned to a single strategic GSI or Ecosystem Motion and staffed with specialists across the oCIO, oCHRO, and oCFO domains, along with a dedicated Business Value Architect. The pod works across the partner’s solution consulting teams, architects, offering leaders, and value desks to ensure the partner’s Workday practice is equipped, differentiated, and positioned to grow. As a Partner AI Architect (oCIO) at the Principal or Senior Partner Enterprise Architect level, you are the technical authority within your pod for Workday’s AI platform, integration architecture, and agentic capabilities. Your focus is ensuring the partner’s most technical teams — architects, CTOs, and offering developers — have the depth of understanding they need to design, position, and build on Workday’s platform with confidence, well before their customers ask the questions. Your work shapes how the partner’s technical practice thinks about and builds on Workday, so that when platform and agentic decisions are being made at clients, Workday is already the assumed foundation. You will translate complex Workday architecture into clear, credible narratives for CTO-level audiences, design reference architectures the partner can own, and ensure the partner’s demo environments reflect the full, integrated power of Workday’s platform. You will coordinate closely with the Forward Deployed Partner Architect aligned to your GSI, who engages directly on the partner’s largest Workday deals. This role aligns to the Principal Enterprise Architect job skills and core skills, emphasizing enterprise architecture leadership, strategic influence, deep technical expertise, and cross-organizational collaboration.

Requirements

Principal Partner Enterprise Architect: 7+ years of enterprise software solution consulting, architecture, or hands-on experience supporting enterprise software applications at Workday or a comparable enterprise software company.
Principal Partner Enterprise Architect: 5+ years of applied knowledge of cloud architecture, security, reporting, and integration standards, including API-based and native integration patterns.
Principal Partner Enterprise Architect: 5+ years of Workday experience
Principal Partner Enterprise Architect: Experience working with or within Global System Integrators, large SIs, or strategic technology partners — either from the vendor side or from within a GSI or consulting practice.
Principal Partner Enterprise Architect: Demonstrated domain expertise in oCIO-relevant capabilities such as platform architecture, AI/ML integration, agentic frameworks, or enterprise technology strategy.
Senior Partner Enterprise Architect: 5+ years of enterprise software solution consulting, architecture, or hands-on experience supporting enterprise software applications at Workday or a comparable enterprise software company.
Senior Partner Enterprise Architect: 3+ years of applied knowledge of cloud architecture, security, reporting, and integration standards, including API-based and native integration patterns.
Senior Partner Enterprise Architect: 3+ years of Workday experience
Senior Partner Enterprise Architect: Experience working with or within Global System Integrators, large SIs, or strategic technology partners — either from the vendor side or from within a GSI or consulting practice.
Senior Partner Enterprise Architect: Demonstrated domain expertise in oCIO-relevant capabilities such as platform architecture, AI/ML integration, agentic frameworks, or enterprise technology strategy.
Proven ability to engage credibly with GSI CTOs, chief architects, and offering development leads as a technical peer and trusted advisor, grounded in deep platform knowledge and/or prior consulting or implementation experience.
Strong command of Workday’s technical architecture and AI platform — including Sana, Data Cloud, and integration frameworks — or equivalent experience with a clear track record of ramping quickly on new platforms; deep Workday knowledge is highly valued.
Experience designing and delivering reference architectures, technical playbooks, or integration standards that are adopted at scale within a partner or enterprise organization.
Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, outcome-oriented narratives for both technical and executive audiences, with strong written and verbal communication skills.
AI evangelist mindset: a visceral curiosity for agents, LLMs, RAG, and MCP, with a practical understanding of how to architect and operationalize agentic AI in the enterprise.
Natural feedback loop orientation — you proactively surface what you are seeing in partner practices (architectural challenges, emerging patterns, competitive signals) back to Workday’s Product & Technology teams so the platform continues to reflect real partner and customer needs.
Highly collaborative working style with demonstrated ability to coordinate across GPO, Product & Technology, Forward Deployed, Solution Consulting, and other cross-functional teams.
Energized by a fast-moving, investment-stage environment, comfortable operating where standards are being written, not just followed, with a strong bias toward learning, iteration, and continuous improvement.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary technical authority for Workday’s AI platform, integration architecture (A2A, MCP), agentic capabilities, and Data Cloud within your pod.
Ensure the partner’s architects and technical teams have deep, current knowledge of Workday’s platform and roadmap well ahead of general availability, so they confidently lead platform conversations before Workday is in the room.
Design and deliver architect-tier sessions and technical deep-dives that build genuine fluency within the partner’s elite technical teams, not just surface-level awareness.
Maintain authoritative knowledge of Workday’s technical roadmap and translate upcoming releases into clear implications for the partner’s architecture patterns, delivery standards, and solution portfolio.
Architect reference solutions that articulate how Workday’s unified platform — spanning HCM, Finance, and agentic AI — fits into a client’s broader technology and AI strategy, giving the partner a credible, repeatable story for how Workday anchors the enterprise ecosystem.
Define agent orchestration and governance patterns that leverage Workday’s security framework, data model, and agent system of record to deliver enterprise-grade AI, enabling partners to speak confidently to governance, compliance, and risk.
Design cross-platform agent integration patterns that show how Workday agents connect and collaborate within a client’s broader AI ecosystem, including integration best practices across MCP and A2A that position Workday as the trusted data foundation.
Help the partner identify architectural patterns that create durable, partner-owned IP — ensuring offerings are designed to scale and be reused, rather than remain one-off implementations.
Equip the partner’s technical teams with sharp, current competitive positioning, clearly articulating how Workday’s native architecture and connected data model compares to competitors and generic AI builds stitched together via APIs.
Translate Workday’s technical differentiation into language that resonates with CTOs, chief architects, and senior technology leaders — focusing on architectural implications, risk posture, and long-term platform consequences rather than features alone.
Bring partner-developed architectural patterns and technical innovations back to Workday’s Forward Deployed and field teams, ensuring those insights strengthen Workday’s broader technical positioning and sales motions.
Serve as a first line of defense for the partner’s technical teams — fielding architectural objections, platform questions, and complex technical issues encountered with clients, and ensuring the partner has the depth and positioning to move forward with confidence.
Represent Workday alongside the partner at joint industry events, technical forums, and architecture conferences — co-presenting on platform strategy and agentic AI to strengthen the partner’s technical credibility and Workday’s presence in key conversations.
Partner with the Solution Architecture team to shape demo environment data, functional flows, and provisioning, ensuring the partner’s demo experience reflects the full integration of Workday-delivered product with GSI-delivered solutions, credibly end-to-end.
Bring partner-built solutions and architectural assets back to the Solution Architecture team so Workday’s field teams can demo partner-delivered solutions seamlessly — closing the loop between what the partner builds and what Workday can show.
Build and maintain code accelerators, integration playbooks, and technical reference materials the partner’s teams can deploy at scale across their global practice.
Coordinate with the Forward Deployed Partner Architect on the partner’s largest deals, ensuring architectural standards and patterns defined at the practice level translate directly into deal-level technical confidence.