Principal ML Engineer, Admin Central

Workday, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. is hiring Principal Software Engineer to lead architecture and implementation of next-generation AI platforms and autonomous agent frameworks.

You will work at the intersection of ML, event-driven data systems, and enterprise platform engineering, driving production-grade, scalable systems for tens of millions of daily requests across global tenants. In this hands-on role, you will design ML infrastructure, multi-agent orchestration layers, and high-availability pipelines powering

Qualifications

• 12+ years in ML development & leadership, with extensive ML system design experience.
• 6+ years building scalable ML services and microservices in production.
• 4+ years working with LLMs, generative AI, RAG pipelines, and agent frameworks.
• Expert in high-throughput streaming and distributed storage technologies.

Responsibilities

• Agentic AI & orchestration: implement tool calling and multi-agent workflows.
• Scalable ML infrastructure: secure REST services and event-driven pipelines.
• MLOps & reliability: CI/CD, observability, model monitoring, privacy guardrails.
• Technical leadership: align business needs with scalable architectural designs.

Skills

10+ years ML leadership

6+ years scalable ML services

4+ years with LLMs

LLM orchestration

RAG pipelines

Agentic systems

Model-Based Design

Tool-use frameworks

EDA & feature engineering

Kafka

Spark

Flink

ClickHouse

Iceberg

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Flink

ClickHouse

Iceberg

Job description

Your work days are brighter here.

We're obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we're shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you'll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We're in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you'll do meaningful work with Workmates who've got your back. In return, we'll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you've found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too.

About the Team

We are hiring engineers on two different teams.

Admin Central

Admin Central is building the future of how administrators work across Workday-turning a fragmented patchwork of tools and disconnected AI into a single, unified experience. Within Admin Central, Workday implementations move from being driven by human effort to being powered by intelligence designed into the platform.

Business Process Optimize

The Business Process Optimize team powers the underlying platform infrastructure. You'll build mission-critical distributed systems, high-availability usage pipelines, new agentic functionality, and event-driven data flows across global product regions to ensure enterprise billing integrity at scale. If you're excited to build from scratch, move fast, and transform how thousands of admins work every day, come join us!

About the Role

As a Principal Software Engineer you will lead the architecture and implementation of Workday's next-generation AI platforms and autonomous agent frameworks. You'll sit at the intersection of machine learning, event-driven data systems, and enterprise platform engineering-transforming cutting-edge AI research into production-ready, highly reliable systems handling tens of millions of daily requests for hundreds of enterprise tenants (including over 100+ Tier-0 enterprise tenants).

In this hands-on, high-impact role, you will design the ML infrastructure, multi-agent orchestration layers, and high-availability usage pipelines that power enterprise-grade decision-making, usage tracking, automatic tenant maintenance, and billing integrity across international regions.

Your Primary Focus

• Agentic AI & Orchestration: Design, implement, and maintain advanced agentic capabilities, including tool calling, multi-agent workflows, long-range planning, reasoning frameworks, and human-in-the-loop integrations.
• Scalable ML Infrastructure: Build secure, high-throughput REST services and event-driven data pipelines using Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and cloud-native tech. Architect multi-tenant runtimes that deliver fast, low-latency inference to millions of global users.
• MLOps & Enterprise Reliability: Establish end-to-end MLOps standards-including CI/CD automation, observability, evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, and privacy/anonymization guardrails-ensuring systems are explainable, secure, and production-resilient.
• Technical & Strategic Leadership: Partner closely with software engineers, Product Managers, Data Engineering, SRE, and Legal/Compliance stakeholders to turn ambiguous business needs into scalable technical designs and long-term data-governance strategies.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• 12+ years in ML development and R&D leadership, including 8+ years with advanced ML methodologies, distributed frameworks, and cloud-based platforms - designing complex, scalable, production-grade ML systems.
• 6+ years building and hosting scalable ML services, microservices, and high-throughput data pipelines in production using Java, Go, Scala, or Python.
• 4+ years working with LLMs, generative AI, RAG pipelines, and autonomous agent frameworks for real-world enterprise applications.

Other Qualifications

• Data Processing & Pipelines: Expert in high-throughput streaming (Kafka), real-time feature extraction (Spark/Flink), and distributed columnar storage (ClickHouse, Iceberg) to architect large-scale ML pipelines.
• AI/ML Expertise: Deep knowledge of deep learning, LLM orchestration, RAG, and agentic systems - applying ML algorithms and Model-Based Design (including MCP integrations and tool-use frameworks) to multi-agent coordination, intent classification, and workflow optimization.
• Data Analysis & Feature Engineering: Proven ability to lead EDA on multi-tenant agentic workflows to shape data strategy, paired with mastery of high-dimensional embeddings, ve