Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Workday, Inc.; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. seeks a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to partner with enterprise customers to architect, build, deploy, and optimize custom AI agents within live environments.

You will work with the Developer Platform stack and the Workday Agent Harness to deliver scalable agentic solutions that integrate HR and finance data. You will collaborate with AI, product, and services teams to drive customer success, define deployment patterns, and ensure governance and security while expanding the

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems.
• Proficient in Python or Java and REST APIs.
• Experience working with enterprise clients on complex software deployments.
• Willingness to travel up to 20%.

Responsibilities

• Agent Engineering & Deployment: Build, deploy, configure, and debug custom AI agents and agentic apps inside live enterprise tenants.
• Customer Discovery & Agent Architecture: Lead technical discovery sessions with key customer stakeholders, translating complex requirements into robust configurations, POCs, and integration specs.
• Developer Toolkit Feedback: Be a hands-on user of Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, and the Agent Harness, giving precise feedback to improve the toolkit.
• Productization of Field Insights: Identify recurring deployment challenges and help transform fixes into standardized product capabilities and playbooks.
• Building Total Agentic Systems with Fellow FDEs: Collaborate with Workday’s agent teams to deliver complete agentic systems, pairing custom agents with first-party agents across platforms.
• Engagement Milestones & Graduation: Guide engagements through milestones to enable self-sustaining customer ownership within 6-month deployment cycles.

Skills

Agent engineering

LLMs

Python/Java

REST APIs

Customer engagement

Travel up to 20%

Tools

MCP

A2A

Workday Extend

Agent SDKs

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

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution across Agent Factory, Sana, Data Cloud, and the Developer Platform. When Workday launches new AI agents and platform capabilities, early deployments surface complex real-world challenges, from unstructured tenant data and intricate configurations to edge-case enterprise workflows. The Developer Platform FDE team focuses on agent development: custom AI agents and agentic apps that run on Workday rails and surface anywhere. We work with the customers building their own agents on the Workday Developer Platform, using the same infrastructure Workday uses to power its own agents. Every agent we help ship inherits the security model, business process controls, and audit trail of the system of record for people and money at some of the world’s largest organizations, and thanks to open protocols, those agents can show up in Workday, in Sana, or inside the AI tools people already use every day. FDEs also serve as a critical feedback engine for Product and Engineering. On the Developer Platform team, you’ll build production agents with Developer Agent, Agent-Ready Tools, and the Agent Harness, and work directly with the product and engineering teams behind those tools. Field insights, recurring customer friction, and proven build patterns become scalable, out-of-the-box capabilities that reach every developer building on Workday. It’s a team where deep technical skill meets real customer impact every day, with direct influence over where the platform goes next.

About the Role

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer on the Developer Platform FDE team, you’ll bridge hands‑on agent engineering with high-impact customer technical strategy. You’ll partner with enterprise customers to architect, build, deploy, and optimize custom AI agents and agentic apps inside live customer environments. You’ll work with the full Workday Developer Platform stack. You’ll run custom agents on the Workday Agent Harness, the same agent runtime and infrastructure Workday uses internally. You’ll build agents, apps, and orchestrations in plain language with Developer Agent, from the Workday Developer Site, a VS Code‑compatible IDE plug‑in, or any other MCP‑compatible agentic tool, such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex. You’ll wire agents into hundreds of governed, LLM‑native Agent‑Ready Tools for HR and finance data over MCP, and build with industry‑leading ADKs and agent frameworks. You’ll connect agents to each other and to the places people work using open standards like MCP, A2A, and A2UI, alongside REST APIs. And you’ll do it with governance built in, not bolted on, through Workday Extend AI, the Agent System of Record, Agent Passport, and Workday Data Cloud. You’ll work across the full deployment lifecycle alongside AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads. Your primary objective is twofold: drive immediate customer success, and eliminate implementation friction over time by embedding field‑tested solutions back into the core platform.

What you’ll do:

• Agent Engineering & Deployment: Build, deploy, configure, and debug custom AI agents and agentic apps inside live enterprise tenants, working against live data, business processes, and security configurations.
• Customer Discovery & Agent Architecture: Lead technical discovery sessions with key customer stakeholders, translating complex business requirements into robust product configurations, POCs, and integration specs.
• Developer Toolkit Feedback: Be a hands‑on, everyday user of Developer Agent, Agent‑Ready Tools, and the Agent Harness. Partner with Developer, AI, and Integration Platform product teams, providing specific feedback that improves the developer toolkit for the open Workday ecosystem, and capture field telemetry, edge‑case failures, and customer friction points that directly influence the product roadmap and engineering backlog.
• Productization of Field Insights: Identify recurring deployment challenges and help transform custom fixes into standardized, automated, out‑of‑the‑box product capabilities, contributing to the reference architectures, playbooks, and pattern guidance that let customers and partners build without us.
• Building Total Agentic Systems with Fellow FDEs: Collaborate with FDEs across Workday’s other agent areas, including first‑party agents, Sana, Data Cloud, and Deployment AI, to deliver complete agentic systems. For example, you might pair a custom agent built on the Developer Platform with Workday’s first‑party agents, orchestrate them through Sana over A2A, and ground them in Data Cloud.
• Engagement Milestones & Graduation: Guide engagements through structured milestones, from kickoff to graduation, enabling self‑sustaining customer ownership within standard 6‑month deployment cycles. Workday Services owns the customer project; you own your part of the technical agent‑development workstream.

About You

Basic Qualifications

Experience: 7+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Software Development. Agent Engineering: Hands‑on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems, such as tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation, or agent orchestration. Technical Execution: Hands‑on coding and debugging skills (for example, Python, Java, or similar), with a solid understanding of REST APIs, object‑oriented design, system architecture, and integration patterns. Customer Interaction: Proven experience working directly with enterprise clients on complex software deployments, live data troubleshooting, and custom workflow integration. Travel: Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed.

Other Qualifications

Product Mindset: Ability to abstract generalizable product requirements from bespoke customer issues. Communication: Exceptional verbal and written technical communication skills; skilled at translating complex technical challenges for non‑technical leadership. Ambiguity & Agility: Thrives in fast‑paced environments with evolving requirements across Product, Engineering, Services, and Sales teams. Collaboration: A highly collaborative, low‑ego team player adept at working within multi‑disciplinary account and delivery pods.

Preferred Qualifications

Working knowledge of Workday, including business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, and integrations. Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or Agent2Agent (A2A), including building or consuming MCP servers or multi‑agent systems. Experience with one or more agent development kits or orchestration frameworks. Experience designing evaluations, observability, and guardrails for agents, including agent security concerns such as prompt injection, tool misuse, and least‑privilege access. Experience building developer tools, SDKs, or platforms. Experience with Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday Integrations.

Workday Pay Transparency Statement

The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role‑specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.

Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton Primary Location Base Pay Range: $176,000 USD - $264,000 USD Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $148,200 USD - $264,000 USD

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in‑person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in‑office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you’ll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Equal Opportunity & Inclusion

Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans. Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision‑making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law. Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodations, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law. If you require a reasonable accommodation, you may email [e-mail], as far in advance as possible.

Workday is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Workday are considered without regards to age, ancestry, color, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, protected family care or medical leave status, race, religion (including beliefs and practices or the absence thereof), sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Further, pursuant to applicable local ordinances, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We do not accept resumes from headhunters, placement agencies, or other suppliers that have not signed a formal agreement with us.

Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision‑making to any degree. Please see below for more details including how to request an accommodation as a qualified veteran, due to a disability or for religious reasons, or as otherwise provided under applicable law. Workday prohibits taking adverse action against any candidate or employee for reporting a possible violation of this policy, requesting one or more work accommodation, exercising a privacy right, or cooperating in an investigation in accordance with applicable law. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination of employment, to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law. If you require a reasonable accommodation, you may email [e-mail], as far in advance as possible.