Forward Deployed Engineer (Growth Solutions)

Workiva Inc.; Ames (IA); Remote; USD 111,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

Restricted Stock Units

401(k) match

Job summary

Workiva Inc. (Growth Solutions) seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer to apply GenAI engineering to complex reporting and regulatory challenges on the Workiva platform.

You will design, build, and deploy AI-powered solutions for financial reporting, sustainability disclosure, tax transparency, and audits, balancing innovation with governance and production readiness. The role is customer-facing, involves edge deployments, and requires hands-on development with a focus on scalable, auditable, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience delivering software solutions to enterprise customers.
• Experience with reporting and analytics technology, financial, sustainability, governance, risk, compliance, or adjacent domains.

Responsibilities

• Own the hardest customer problems end-to-end from prototype to production.
• Design and deploy AI-powered workflows addressing real customer challenges.
• Engage credibly with technical and business stakeholders, including regulatory teams and IT.

Skills

GenAI engineering

Stakeholder communication

Solution design

Production-grade software

Customer-facing delivery

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

SAP

Oracle

ServiceNow

Salesforce

Job description

Summary

As part of Workiva's Growth Solutions team, the Forward Deployed Engineer serves as a forward‑deployed builder, applying GenAI engineering to complex reporting and regulatory challenges. Working directly with customers across financial reporting, sustainability disclosure, tax transparency, audit, and other regulated domains, this role designs, builds, and deploys AI‑powered solutions on the Workiva platform. Success requires balancing innovation with the governance, auditability, and scalability needed for production use in highly regulated environments. This is not a traditional implementation role. The Forward Deployed Engineer combines customer‑facing solution delivery with AI application development, including agent-based workflows, prompt engineering, system integration, and solution architecture. In close partnership with customer stakeholders, Sales, Product Management, and Engineering, this role defines new solutions through deeply understanding of customer needs. The Forward Deployed Engineer works within a purpose‑built operating model alongside Product Management and Engineering. Product owns solution strategy and roadmap; Engineering builds and maintains the platform; the Forward Deployed Engineer owns what happens at the edge, deploying existing and emerging platform capabilities against real customer problems while continuously feeding discoveries back to Product and Engineering. This role solves immediate customer problems while creating reusable patterns and insights that help shape future platform capabilities.

What You’ll Do

Own the hardest customer problems end‑to‑end. Take ambiguous, first‑of‑their‑kind customer problems and drive them from prototype to stable production across multiple deployments. You own technical delivery, and you own whether it actually works for the customer. Design and deploy AI‑powered workflows that address real customer challenges, building, testing, and operationalizing solutions while establishing appropriate controls for human review, exception management, and governance in regulated environments. The specific techniques evolve constantly; what matters is the ability to work at the frontier, figure out what hasn't been figured out yet, and turn that into something stable and repeatable. Drive customer outcomes as a trusted technical advisor to customer regulatory, operations, and IT stakeholders. Facilitate executive discussions, technical workshops, and solution reviews while helping customers achieve measurable business outcomes and long‑term adoption. Shape the next generation of customer solutions through hands‑on development. Fieldwork is where the next generation of platform capability comes from. Turn recurring customer problems and real‑world outcomes into the evaluation criteria, patterns, and priorities that Product and Engineering build into the platform. The frontier moves because of what is found at the edge. Contribute to a compounding knowledge base. What you discover at the customer becomes what the team knows collectively. You’ll contribute patterns, methods, and field learnings into the shared knowledge environment, building a compounding base of expertise that every SDC draws on. That includes peer mentoring, but the real contribution is the institutional knowledge you build, not just the individual relationships.

What You’ll Need

Minimum Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience. 5+ years of experience delivering software solutions to enterprise customers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with reporting and analytics technology, financial, sustainability, governance, risk, compliance, or adjacent domains
• Experience configuring, customizing, and delivering software solutions in customer environments, owning complex implementations from requirements through deployment and adoption
• Ability to engage credibly with both technical and business stakeholders, including regulatory teams, IT, and executive sponsors
• Familiarity with enterprise platforms such as SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, Salesforce, or comparable ecosystems and common integration patterns
• Experience working alongside external implementation partners, advisory firms, systems integrators, or audit firms
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, agent‑based architectures, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), evaluation frameworks, and AI application lifecycle management

Travel Requirements and Working Conditions

25% Travel for internal meetings. Reliable internet access for any period of time, working remotely and not in a Workiva office. Workiva will not provide visa sponsorship for this position. Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. on a permanent basis.

How You’ll Be Rewarded

• Salary range in the US: $111,000.00 - $180,000.00
• A discretionary bonus typically paid annually
• Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire
• 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

Why Join Workiva

Workiva is the platform designed to bring confidence, control, and a competitive edge to the world’s most complex organizations. Our AI‑powered platform unifies finance, risk, and sustainability on a single, secure foundation—ensuring data is trusted, traceable, and ready to act on. With an unbroken path from source to output, leaders gain confidence in their numbers, visibility into current and emerging risks, and the ability to move with speed and precision in a constantly changing world. At Workiva, you’ll bring technology to market that executives, boards, and regulators depend on. The work you do here helps organizations navigate uncertainty, maintain trust, and make decisions that stand up to scrutiny. If you’re energized by meaningful challenges, inspired by collaborative teams, and motivated to help organizations turn uncertainty into advantage, we’d love to meet you.

Equal‑Opportunity Statement

Employment decisions are made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other protected characteristic. Workiva is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Workplace Flexibility

Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.