Forward Deployed (FDE) Manager

We’re Workday, a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents. We're looking for a Forward Deployed (FDE) Manager to lead one or more FDE pods, reporting into the SVP who owns Workday’s Data Cloud platform portfolio.

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution across Agent Factory, Sana, Products, and the Developer Platform. As the FDE Manager, you will be accountable for the health of the FDE operating model within your pods: making sure your engineers are deployed against the right customer engagements, that their time compounds into permanent product improvements rather than one-off delivery work, and that each engagement moves cleanly through selection, kick-off, and exit.

Responsibilities

• Hire, coach, and develop a high performing group of FDEs. Own pod staffing and allocation across 2–4 pods (~10 customer projects per pod), matching FDE skills to the right engagements.
• Run the engagement lifecycle, ensure FDEs are engaged in high value projects and track and report progress of your products toward a graduation scorecard (includes metrics such as live and reference-able customer counts, time to deploy/configure without FDE support, customer and support readiness etc) in partnership with the PAO team.
• Partner with Workday Services leads, AI Deployment Architects, Account Teams (AE/MP/CSM), and Product Managers to keep each engagement properly resourced and the FDE's time focused on product hardening rather than broader account management.
• Ensure the product feedback loop operates at pod level: field telemetry, recurring friction, and configuration patterns are captured, triaged, and routed into the product and engineering backlog so fixes become standard, automated capabilities.
• Build and share playbooks, configuration patterns, and known-issue guides across your pods, and hand them off to the teams that scale deployments once a product graduates.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, Software Development, or Product/Program Management within complex enterprise environments, including direct, hands-on work with enterprise customers.
• 5+ years of experience managing, leading, or coaching technical teams (direct people management or demonstrated technical/team leadership of engineers in customer-facing or field-deployment settings).
• Technical depth sufficient to review and guide hands-on engineering work: solid understanding of coding and debugging (e.g., Python, Java, or similar), REST APIs, system architecture, and integration patterns.
• Proven experience managing multiple concurrent, complex software deployments or customer engagements in parallel, including live data troubleshooting and custom workflow integration.

Benefits

• Annualized base salary ranges: $209,600 USD - $314,400 USD
• Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus
• Annual refresh stock grants
• Comprehensive benefits
• Flexible work arrangements: spend at least half (50%) of your time each quarter in the office or in the field