Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

1d•$148,200 - $264,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer on Workday’s Developer Platform Forward Deployed Engineering team bridges hands-on agent engineering with customer technical strategy. The role partners with enterprise customers to architect, build, deploy, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic applications in live customer environments, using the Workday Developer Platform and its agent runtime, tools, and governance capabilities. The engineer works across the deployment lifecycle with AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads. The role aims both to deliver immediate customer success and to reduce implementation friction by translating field-tested solutions into scalable platform capabilities. It also works closely with Product and Engineering teams, sharing customer feedback, field telemetry, recurring challenges, and proven patterns that inform platform improvements and product roadmaps. The position involves guiding engagements through structured milestones, generally within standard six-month deployment cycles, and enabling customers to own their solutions. Workday Services owns the customer project; this engineer owns the technical agent-development workstream. The role requires travel to customer sites as needed and follows Workday’s flexible-work approach, with at least half of each quarter spent in the office or in the field, depending on the role.

Requirements

At least 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, such as Python, Java, or similar.
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.
Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills, including explaining complex technical challenges to non-technical leadership.
Ability to work effectively amid ambiguity and evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales teams.
Collaborative, low-ego approach and ability to work within multidisciplinary account and delivery teams.
Ability to derive generalizable product requirements from bespoke customer issues.

Nice To Haves

Working knowledge of Workday business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and integrations.
Experience with MCP or 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 addressing 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 actionable 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 turn 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.
Own the technical agent-development workstream while coordinating with Workday Services, which owns the customer project.