Software Development Engineer - AI Tools

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Welcome to the AI Tools team at Workday! We identify, deploy, and scale AI-powered tools that eliminate friction from the developer experience - and extend those capabilities to the broader organization as they mature. We build the AI platform layer that powers code generation, AI-assisted code review, agentic workflows, and enterprise-wide developer tooling. We own the MCP registry and gateway that connects Workday's developers to AI capabilities, and we build the technical guardrails that operationalize how AI is used responsibly across the company. If you want to do high-impact AI infrastructure work in enterprise software, we'd love to hear from you. The Workday AI Tools team is looking for a software engineer who's excited to build the infrastructure behind enterprise AI. You'll work across our MCP server ecosystem, LLM gateway, and developer-facing tooling - writing real production code that Workday engineers use every day. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role on a small team that moves quickly, so you'll have room to grow fast. You'll also work directly with the engineers using these tools - answering questions in Slack, supporting onboarding, and feeding their feedback back into the platform.

Requirements

3+ years of software engineering experience
Production experience building backend services or developer tooling in Python and/or TypeScript
Familiarity with LLM APIs and basic prompt engineering concepts
Working understanding of AI security and responsible AI principles - including awareness of prompt injection, data handling risks, and how to build AI integrations that respect policy and compliance boundaries
Genuine excitement about the cutting edge of AI - you stay current on new tools, models, and frameworks, and you're eager to bring what you're learning into your day-to-day work

Nice To Haves

Understanding of AI agent architectures, including the ReAct pattern and how agents reason, plan, and use tools iteratively; hands-on experience building or experimenting with agents is a plus
Experience building MCP servers, skills, or tool-use integrations; comfort reading and contributing to the MCP ecosystem
Experience building or consuming REST APIs
Working knowledge of Docker and container-based deployments; experience with Kubernetes is a plus, and exposure to workflow orchestration or infrastructure-as-code tooling is welcome
Familiarity with DevOps practices and CI/CD systems
Understanding of authentication and authorization fundamentals (OAuth, SSO, API keys)
Comfort working in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Experience adding observability to services - logging, metrics, alerting
Comfort partnering directly with the engineers who use your tools - you're happy to answer questions, support adoption, and treat user feedback as input, not interruption
Strong written communication skills; able to document your work clearly for other developers

Responsibilities

Build and maintain MCP servers, AI integrations, and developer tools that improve the daily workflow for Workday's engineering org
Write scripts and automation that streamline AI tool onboarding, configuration, and fleet management
Instrument services with logging and monitoring to keep our platform observable and reliable
Work with Security and compliance partners to implement policy requirements in our tooling
Participate in code review and help maintain a high standard for the team's codebase
Stay current on the AI tooling landscape and contribute ideas for what the team should build or adopt next