Senior Principal Architect, AI Platform

Workday • Pleasanton, CA

2d • $205,200 - $363,600 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Principal Architect is the most senior architecture leader in Workday’s AI Platform organization. The role owns the platform’s end-to-end architecture, sets its target state and roadmap, and ensures its pillars build toward a coherent design. It requires deep expertise in distributed systems, AI platforms, model engineering, and AI governance.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad organizational and company-wide influence. The successful candidate will define lasting architectural direction, align teams around shared standards, and advise executives on technical strategy and investment. The platform supports building, running, and managing AI agents across large enterprises, including runtimes, orchestration, routing, model management, and data infrastructure. The architecture must support reliability and scale while embedding security, privacy, governance, and compliance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time in senior architecture roles.
• 8+ years defining the architecture of large-scale distributed systems running in production.
• 8+ years running architecture practices, such as reference architectures, architecture decision records, and architecture review boards.
• 5+ years architecting AI or machine learning platforms supporting production workloads at enterprise scale.
• Strong background in model engineering, including model selection, evaluation, serving, and optimization.
• Deep familiarity with large language models, their strengths and limitations, and production architecture patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation and agent orchestration.
• Strong experience with AWS and GCP architecture, including core infrastructure and managed AI services.
• Working knowledge of enterprise AI governance, including security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI practices.
• Ability to set architectural direction and influence multiple teams without direct authority.
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex architecture to executives and engaging deeply with engineers.
• Strong track record of mentoring architects and senior engineers.
• Sound judgment balancing innovation with platform stability, cost, and risk.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with agent frameworks and interaction protocols such as LangGraph, MCP, and A2A.
• Experience architecting container and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes at scale.
• Familiarity with AI regulation and data sovereignty requirements, such as the EU AI Act.
• Recognized technical reputation through publications, patents, open-source contributions, or industry speaking.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term AI Platform architecture vision, target state, and practical roadmap, aligning the architecture with business strategy and the growth of Workday’s agent ecosystem.
• Own the end-to-end architecture of platform services for agents and AI workloads, including runtimes, orchestration, routing, model management, and data infrastructure.
• Set architectural patterns and standards for highly available, large-scale distributed systems, including reliability, performance, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• Define how models are integrated, served, evaluated, and optimized, and guide tradeoffs among model quality, performance, and cost.
• Define cloud architecture across AWS and GCP, including multi-cloud design, managed AI services, and cost-effective infrastructure patterns.
• Partner with AI Governance and Sovereignty and Routing teams to embed governance, security, privacy, and compliance into the platform architecture, supporting auditability, responsible AI, and evolving regulations.
• Establish reference architectures, design patterns, and architecture principles; lead architecture reviews and make or guide critical design decisions.
• Evaluate frameworks, platforms, and vendors, including build-versus-buy decisions, in support of long-term architecture.
• Align AI Platform pillars and Workday architects on shared standards, resolve design conflicts, and ensure the platform integrates with Workday products.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers, raise design quality, and build an architecture community.
• Advise senior leadership on architecture strategy, technical risk, and investment tradeoffs.
• Represent Workday through industry partnerships, standards bodies, open-source communities, and conferences.

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 referenced, but specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal