Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution, working across all of Workday's AI product teams.

As a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer on the Developer Platform FDE team, you'll bridge hands-on agent engineering with high-impact customer technical strategy, taking on the most complex, ambiguous customer builds where no existing playbook applies.

Responsibilities

• Agent Engineering & Deployment: Architect, build, deploy, and debug custom AI agents and agentic apps to solve the most interesting problems in the enterprise, working against live data, business processes, and security configurations, frequently in situations with no established precedent.
• Customer Discovery & Agent Architecture: Lead technical discovery sessions with senior leaders at customer organizations, translating ambiguous business requirements into enterprise-grade product builds.
• Developer Toolkit Feedback & Influence: Be the first and most demanding user of our platform. Partner directly with product and engineering teams to provide critical, specific feedback that improves the developer toolkit for the entire Workday ecosystem.
• Productization of Field Insights: Identify best practices and patterns and lead the work of turning custom fixes into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box product capabilities, along with the reference architectures, playbooks, and evaluation approaches that accelerate adoption.
• Building Total Agentic Systems with Fellow FDEs: Collaborate with FDEs across Workday's AI product areas to deliver complete agentic systems.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as technical lead for your pod, shaping the product-improvement thesis at engagement kickoff and evaluating it at exit, guiding engagements through structured milestones to graduation within standard 6-month deployment cycles, and coaching other FDEs on agent engineering and customer engagement.

Requirements

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development, including experience leading complex, high-stakes enterprise technical engagements.
• Technical Execution: Hands-on coding and debugging skills (for example, Python, Java, or similar), with deep knowledge of REST APIs, object-oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns.
• Travel: Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.

Benefits

• Annualized base salary ranges: $206,400 USD - $309,600 USD
• Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus
• Annual refresh stock grants
• Comprehensive benefits
• Flexible work arrangements