Senior Forward Deployed Engineer - Developer Platform

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 Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution, working across all of Workday’s AI product teams. 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. FDEs are the engineers who solve them. The Developer Platform FDE team is where custom enterprise AI gets built. We work at the front line with customers creating their own AI agents and agentic apps on Workday, moving fast from first conversation to production and solving problems no one has a playbook for yet. Using the newest tools in enterprise AI, we build agents that run on Workday rails, reach people wherever they work, and deliver measurable outcomes for some of the world’s largest organizations: work that used to take days done in minutes, processes that run themselves, and better decisions across HR, finance, and beyond. FDEs also serve as a critical feedback engine for Product and Engineering. You’ll work directly with the product and engineering teams behind our developer platform, turning field insights, recurring customer friction, and proven build patterns into 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, and where you’ll actively shape what the platform becomes 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, taking on the most complex, ambiguous customer builds where no existing playbook applies. You’ll partner with enterprise customers, often at the executive level, 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, and build them with our Developer Agent and industry-leading agentic tools, ADKs, and agent frameworks. You’ll give agents secure access to HR and finance data and actions through Agent-Ready Tools over MCP, connect them to each other over A2A, and surface them wherever users already work, from Workday and Sana to the AI tools people use every day. You’ll work across the full deployment lifecycle alongside AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads, taking customer agents from idea to production delivering real business results. You’ll also help set the technical direction for how custom agents get built on Workday: turning field-tested solutions into scalable product capabilities, defining the patterns other builders will follow, and mentoring other engineers along the way. What you'll do: 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. Synthesize field telemetry, edge-case failures, and recurring friction into insights that directly shape the product roadmap and engineering backlog. 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. 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. 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. Workday Services owns the customer project; you own the technical agent-development workstream and the product insight it produces. About You Basic Qualifications Experience: 7+ 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. Other Qualifications Executive Customer Partnership: Demonstrated experience working directly with enterprise executives on complex software deployments, live data troubleshooting, and custom workflow integration, acting as a trusted technical advisor. Product Mindset: Skilled at abstracting durable, generalizable product requirements from one-off customer issues, and at using field insight to influence what gets built next. 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. Collaborative Leadership: A highly collaborative, low-ego teammate who mentors other engineers and helps multi-disciplinary account and delivery pods work well together. Preferred Qualifications Hands-on experience building LLM-powered or agentic systems, including tool and function calling, prompt and context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, agent orchestration, evaluation, and building or consuming Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Agent2Agent (A2A) multi-agent systems. Experience building on the Workday platform, including tools such as Workday Extend, Workday Orchestrate, or Workday In