Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer joins Workday’s Developer Platform Forward Deployed Engineering team, which works at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution. The team helps customers build custom AI agents and agentic applications on the Workday Developer Platform and feeds deployment insights back into product development.

This role combines hands-on agent engineering with customer technical strategy. The engineer partners with enterprise customers to architect, build, deploy, configure, debug, and optimize custom agents and agentic applications in live customer environments, working with customer data, business processes, and security configurations. The role uses the Workday Developer Platform stack, including the Workday Agent Harness, Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, Workday Extend AI, Agent System of Record, Agent Passport, and Workday Data Cloud, as well as open protocols and REST APIs.

Working across the full deployment lifecycle with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, Workday Services leads, and other FDEs, the engineer leads technical discovery, translates customer requirements into product configurations and technical specifications, and helps customers reach self-sustaining ownership within standard six-month deployment cycles. Workday Services owns the customer project; this engineer owns their technical agent-development workstream. A core objective is to turn recurring customer challenges and proven field solutions into scalable platform capabilities, reference architectures, playbooks, and guidance.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems, such as tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or agent orchestration.
• Hands-on coding and debugging skills in Python, Java, or a similar language.
• Solid understanding of REST APIs, object-oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns.
• Proven experience working directly with enterprise clients on complex software deployments, live-data troubleshooting, and custom workflow integration.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.
• Ability to identify generalizable product requirements from bespoke customer issues.
• Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills, including translating complex technical challenges for non-technical leadership.
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach and ability to work in multidisciplinary account and delivery teams.

Nice To Haves

• Working knowledge of Workday, including business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and integrations.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent2Agent (A2A), including building or consuming MCP servers or multi-agent systems.
• Experience with one or more agent development kits or orchestration frameworks.
• Experience designing agent evaluations, observability, and guardrails, including security measures for prompt injection, tool misuse, and least-privilege access.
• Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or platforms.
• Experience with Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday Integrations.

Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, configure, and debug custom AI agents and agentic applications in live enterprise tenants, working with live data, business processes, and security configurations.
• Lead technical discovery sessions with customer stakeholders and translate business requirements into product configurations, proofs of concept, and integration specifications.
• Use Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, and the Agent Harness, and provide specific feedback to Developer, AI, and Integration Platform product teams.
• Capture field telemetry, edge-case failures, and customer friction points to inform product roadmaps and engineering backlogs.
• Identify recurring deployment challenges and help convert custom fixes into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box capabilities.
• Contribute reference architectures, playbooks, and pattern guidance for customers and partners.
• Collaborate with FDEs across first-party agents, Sana, Data Cloud, and Deployment AI to deliver complete agentic systems.
• Guide engagements through milestones from kickoff to graduation, enabling self-sustaining customer ownership within standard six-month deployment cycles.
• Work across the deployment lifecycle with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads, owning the technical agent-development workstream.
• 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.
• Comprehensive benefits are offered; specific benefits are not detailed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

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