Applied AI 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 Intelligence team owns the skills that power Workday's agent platform responsible for customer onboarding through the full post-deployment lifecycle - turning the deep configuration expertise and hard-earned wisdom of our Domain Experts and Deployment Consultants into production-grade, fully tested skills that the agent can execute unattended in live customer tenants.

What we own: The end-to-end skill engine and governance ecosystem, spanning skill knowledge extraction, promotion pipelines, evaluation frameworks, self-correcting drift detection, and developer authoring environments.

How we build: Developer-first authoring environments and automated platform tooling that enable engineers to rapidly craft, test, and publish deterministic skills with built-in guardrails.

Agentic engineering: We build IDE tooling, prompt templates, .cursorrules configurations, and context-ingestion pipelines that allow AI-assisted editors (like Cursor) to natively generate compliant Model Context Protocol (MCP) schemas on the first try.

How we work: Close end-to-end collaboration across domain experts, AI platform engineers, and site reliability teams to transform domain knowledge into trustworthy, production-ready AI skills.

About the Role

We are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to serve as a high-impact bridge between human domain expertise and production AI execution. In this role, you will own the end-to-end authoring, prompt architecture, and API integration of AI skills that power Workday's core agentic capabilities.

This is a pivotal, high-visibility engineering position with cross-organizational impact. You will work directly with top Subject Matter Experts across business units to translate complex enterprise logic, tribal configuration knowledge, and standard operating procedures into deterministic, schema-compliant AI tools using state-of-the-art AI-assisted development environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Enterprise Skill Authoring & Domain Codification: Partner directly with domain experts and senior consultants across business units to translate complex business logic, prose, and raw scripts into optimal, structured AI skill definitions.
• AI-Assisted Editor Mastery: Operate at the cutting edge of AI-driven software development (using Cursor, Claude Code, and custom tooling) to rapidly generate, refactor, and refine prompt logic, tool descriptions, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calls.
• API & Capability Orchestration: Connect skills to backend systems by wiring up enterprise REST APIs, MCP servers, and complex data structures for seamless agent execution.
• Logic Optimization & Deduplication: Abstract messy business procedures into clean, modular logic-separating prose from executable code while optimizing prompt structures for minimal token consumption and maximum execution reliability.
• Edge-Case Stress Testing: Design and implement automated test suites to stress-test skill edge cases, API parameter bounds, fallback logic, and error-handling routines before deployment.
• Enablement & Code Review: Scale authoring standards across Workday by establishing best practices, training domain experts on self-serve authoring workflows, and reviewing submitted skill pull requests for schema compliance and API integrity.
• Enforce Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD): Partner with Domain Experts to curate benchmark eval datasets, implementing LLM-as-a-Judge scoring, trajectory trace analysis, and CI/CD quality gates to validate skill accuracy and prevent regressions prior to production promotion.
• Production Telemetry & Drift Analysis: Establish feedback loops using production agent trace logs to identify trajectory failures, update eval benchmark suites, and continuously improve skill deterministic behavior.

About You

Basic Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience in Python or TypeScript with a focus on API integrations, backend services, or scripting.
• 1+ years of hands-on experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to author, refactor, and debug production code.
• Strong experience working with REST APIs, JSON/YAML schemas, and structured data transformations.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Other Qualifications

• Strong technical communication and interpersonal skills to collaborate effectively with non-technical domain experts and translate requirements into clean technical specs.
• Generative AI & Tool Calling: Solid grasp of prompt engineering, function calling, structured outputs, and agentic specifications (e.g., Model Context Protocol / MCP).
• Code Refactoring & Systems Rigor: Ability to dissect complex domain scripts or unstructured documentation and refactor them into modular, testable, production-ready code.
• Testing & Quality Mindset: Experience writing unit/integration test cases, mocking API dependencies, and debugging schema mismatches.
• Strategic Agility: Ability to ramp up quickly on new business domains (e.g., moving from HR payroll logic to complex tax or financial workflows) and deliver high-impact capabilities in rapid iteration cycles.
• Experience building or operating LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., Ragas, DeepEval, Braintrust, LangSmith, or custom assertion suites) to benchmark tool-calling accuracy, prompt drift, and agent success rates

Workday Pay Transparency Statement (For EU Locations Only)

Listed below is the base salary range applicable to this position. Workday pay ranges (and the precise pay offered to the successful candidate) are based on a number of objective criteria such as relevant experience and skills, and educational qualifications, level of responsibility, demands of the role, work location and business need. 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 awarded by Workday Inc. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.

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 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 [email protected], as far in advance as possible.

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