Senior/Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Products

Workday, Inc. (old); United States; On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with key early customers to deploy, configure, and improve our AI products and agents. You will collaborate with product and engineering teams as an extension of internal product managers and drive deployments within Early Access programs.

The role emphasizes hands-on deployment, rapid iteration with customer feedback, and close coordination with HR, Finance, and IT stakeholders to ensure successful outcomes.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in product management, consulting, solutions engineering, implementation, or customer support within complex enterprise environments
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed
• 10+ years of experience in technical product management, solution arch

Responsibilities

• Lead customer discovery to understand each customer's goals and what success looks like for them
• Act as the day-to-day lead for design partners and EA customers: setting and resetting expectations, working with senior leaders across HR, Finance, and IT, and repairing relationships when a deployment hits a rough patch
• Run EA deployments end to end: implement, configure, debug, and improve the solution through rapid iteration with direct customer feedback
• Interpret customer tenant data, configuration, and unique workflows, and how the agent performs against them
• Triage every issue quickly, sorting bugs from configuration issues, product gaps, and change-management needs, prioritize them, and route each to the right owner with the right urgency
• Keep customers and internal teams updated on status, risks, and next steps
• Turn customer feedback into clear problem statements, reproduction details, and evidence that product and engineering can act on to make the agent more accurate and reliable
• Help define, measure, and assess the pre-GA stage gates and graduation scorecard for your product
• Build playbooks, configuration patterns, and known-issue guides, and hand them off to the teams that scale deployments and build documentation
• Partner closely with your product's program manager and the Workday Services lead on each customer project
• Stay engaged through early GA until your product meets its graduation criteria, and remain a point of contact for major customers and future releases afterward

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

You'll join the AI Products team, where we build Workday's AI agents from the ground up. Our mission is to bring these agents to life inside real customer environments - testing them against real data, real workflows, and real use cases. We're early in the agent lifecycle, which means the work here is hands-on, fast-moving, and genuinely entrepreneurial: you'll often help write the playbook for how Workday deploys a new agent, rather than follow one that already exists. If you want to be close to the product at the exact moment it's taking shape, and to see your fieldwork directly change the product, this is the team to build inside.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work directly with some of Workday's most important early customers to deploy, configure, and improve our AI products and agents. You'll work alongside our product and engineering teams as an extension of our internal product managers, playing a central role in agent Early Access (EA) programs and running the customer deployments inside them. Your mission is to make the product better by putting it to work in a live customer environment. A successful deployment is both a win for the customer and proof that the product is improving, so making early customers successful matters just as much as hardening the agent itself. You'll often be the first person at Workday to run a deployment of a given agent, so good judgment, clear communication, ownership, and organization will matter as much as technical curiosity.

Every deployment will surface something the product wasn't built for yet, so creative problem-solving and a \"yes, and\" mindset are core to this role: instead of telling a customer that something isn't possible, you'll find a way to solve their use case with what exists today, bring them along on what's coming next, and turn the gap into clear feedback for product and engineering.

In this role, you will:

• Lead customer discovery to understand each customer's goals and what success looks like for them


• Act as the day-to-day lead for design partners and EA customers: setting and resetting expectations, working with senior leaders across HR, Finance, and IT, and repairing relationships when a deployment hits a rough patch


• Run EA deployments end to end: implement, configure, debug, and improve the solution through rapid iteration with direct customer feedback


• Interpret customer tenant data, configuration, and unique workflows, and how the agent performs against them


• Triage every issue quickly, sorting bugs from configuration issues, product gaps, and change-management needs, prioritize them, and route each to the right owner with the right urgency


• Keep customers and internal teams updated on status, risks, and next steps


• Turn customer feedback into clear problem statements, reproduction details, and evidence that product and engineering can act on to make the agent more accurate and reliable


• Help define, measure, and assess the pre-GA stage gates and graduation scorecard for your product


• Build playbooks, configuration patterns, and known-issue guides, and hand them off to the teams that scale deployments and build documentation


• Partner closely with your product's program manager and the Workday Services lead on each customer project


• Stay engaged through early GA until your product meets its graduation criteria, and remain a point of contact for major customers and future releases afterward

About You

Basic Qualifications - P4 (Senior) 7+ years of experience in product management, consulting, solutions engineering, implementation, or customer support within complex enterprise environments

Willingness and ability to travel up to 20% to customer sites as needed

Basic Qualifications - P5 (Principal) 10+ years of experience in technical product management, solution arch