Senior Software Development Engineer - AI Tools
About The Position
The AI Tools team builds and scales AI-powered tools to improve developer experience and extend AI capabilities across Workday. Its platform includes code generation, AI-assisted code review, agentic workflows, enterprise developer tooling, an MCP registry and gateway, and technical guardrails for responsible AI use. The Senior Software Development Engineer will design and build AI platform systems used by Workday engineers, including LLM gateways, MCP server infrastructure, AI-native agents, and compliance tooling. The role helps determine how emerging AI capabilities are integrated into the platform and provides technical leadership for high-quality, fast-moving work. The engineer also engages directly with tool users through office hours, Slack support, and the Champions program, incorporating their feedback into the work.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of software engineering experience.
- At least 3 years building and operating backend services or platform infrastructure in production.
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript.
- Hands-on experience building or integrating with LLM APIs and familiarity with prompt engineering, evaluation pipelines, and model selection tradeoffs.
- Robust understanding of AI security and responsible AI practices, including prompt injection, model misuse, data leakage risks, output validation, and production policy guardrails.
- Genuine interest in emerging AI models, tools, and frameworks.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to drive alignment across engineering, security, and product stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience designing and building AI agents, fluency with agentic frameworks and patterns such as ReAct, and practical experience shipping reliable production agents.
- Experience building MCP servers, Claude skills, or similar tool-use integrations.
- Comfort designing REST APIs and service-oriented architectures.
- Experience with Kubernetes or Docker, and deploying services to cloud environments.
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools and infrastructure-as-code.
- Understanding of enterprise security patterns, including authentication, authorization, SSO, and secrets management.
- Exposure to observability tools for logging, metrics, and tracing, and a habit of building monitorable systems.
- Comfort partnering directly with tool users and treating feedback, support, and adoption work as part of the role.
Responsibilities
- Design and build the AI platform layer, including LLM gateways, MCP registries, abstraction APIs, and shared infrastructure.
- Architect and implement AI agents and automation that improve developer workflows such as code review, documentation, and testing.
- Evaluate and integrate AI model providers, considering cost, safety, and performance tradeoffs.
- Track emerging AI models, tools, and frameworks, and recommend to engineering leadership whether to adopt, evaluate, or pass on them.
- Lead technical design for complex, cross-cutting projects in partnership with Security, DevEx, and infrastructure teams.
- Build observability and governance tooling that provides visibility into organizational use of AI tools.
- Operationalize AI policy and compliance requirements in the platform.
- Support engineers using the tools through office hours, Slack, and the Champions program, and use their feedback to shape the work.
Benefits
- May be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus.
- May be eligible for annual refresh stock grants.
- Workday provides information about comprehensive benefits in Canada and the US.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
