Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

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, Products, and the Developer Platform. When Workday launches new AI agents and products, early deployments surface complex real-world challenges—from unstructured tenant data and intricate configurations to edge-case enterprise workflows.

FDE pods deploy directly into active customer engagements to resolve technical friction, debug complex setups, and build lightweight integrations. Crucially, FDEs serve as the primary feedback engine for Product and Engineering: field insights, recurring customer friction, and configuration patterns are converted directly into scalable, out-of-the-box product capabilities. It's a team where deep technical skill meets real customer impact, every day.

About the Role

As a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll bridge hands-on software development with high-impact customer technical strategy — taking on the most complex, ambiguous engagements where no existing playbook applies. You will partner with enterprise customers, often at the executive level, to architect, deploy, debug, and optimize Workday's AI agents and developer platform solutions inside live customer environments.

You'll work across the full deployment lifecycle alongside AI Deployment Architects, Product Managers, and Workday Services leads. Beyond delivering for individual customers, you'll help set the technical direction for the FDE practice itself: turning field-tested solutions into scalable product capabilities and mentoring other engineers along the way.

What you'll do:

• •Technical Deployment & Engineering: Architect, deploy, configure, and debug AI agents and integrations inside the most complex live enterprise tenant environments, frequently in situations with no established precedent.
• •Customer Discovery & Solution Architecture: Lead technical discovery sessions with senior leaders at customer organizations, translating ambiguous business requirements into robust product configurations, POCs, and integration specs.
• •Product Feedback & Influence: Synthesize field telemetry, edge-case failures, and recurring customer friction into insights that directly shape the product roadmap and engineering backlog.
• •Productization of Field Insights: Identify patterns across many engagements and lead the work of turning custom fixes into standardized, automated, out-of-the-box product capabilities.
• •Cross-Functional & Executive Alignment: Act as a trusted technical advisor to Workday Services leads, AI Deployment Architects, Account Teams, and customer executives, keeping every engagement focused on core product strength.
• •Engagement Leadership & Mentorship: Own the most strategically important or technically complex engagements end-to-end — from kickoff through graduation — within standard 6-month deployment cycles, while coaching other FDEs on technical approach and customer engagement.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• •Experience: 10+ 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.
• •Workday Knowledge: Working knowledge of Workday, including business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, integrations, and how customers implement and govern Workday, so you can read a customer's tenant and understand how agentic features and agents will behave inside it.
• •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

Applied experience with LLM-powered or agentic AI systems — e.g., prompt/context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, or agent orchestration frameworks — and a working understanding of how model behavior shows up as product and customer-facing issues in the field.

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: $206,400 USD - $309,600 USD

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $173,300 USD - $309,600 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.

Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will cons