AI Engineer

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.

Agent Factory is where Workday’s next chapter gets built. We’re forming small, senior, cross-functional AI teams that bring together product leaders, AI engineers, and full-stack builders to create intelligent agents used by millions of people every day. This is production-grade AI—deeply embedded into Workday’s platform—not research experiments or maintenance work. Teams own problems end to end, collaborate tightly across disciplines, and use the right tools to solve real customer challenges at global scale. You’ll work at the intersection of AI, platform architecture, and human workflows, with the autonomy to shape how agents reason, act, and scale responsibly. High trust, high expectations, and real impact. Engineering, but brighter.

About the Role

As an AI Engineer in Agent Factory, you will develop and integrate the intelligent feature layers behind Workday’s next generation of AI agents. While our ML Engineers focus on building, training, and optimizing foundational algorithms, your mission is intelligence orchestration and product delivery—connecting the brain to the product.

Working within a collaborative, cross-functional pod, you’ll implement how pre-trained foundational models (LLMs, vision APIs, etc.) power functional, user-facing enterprise software. You will be hands-on with building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, managing orchestration frameworks, and continuous prompt engineering. This role sits at the intersection of AI application building and software engineering: you will work closely with senior engineers, product managers, and designers to turn cutting-edge agentic workflows into highly responsive, reliable, and user-centric features embedded directly into the Workday stack.

Requirements

• Basic Qualifications
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a solid track record of developing, testing, and deploying production code.
• 1+ years of professional experience (or a strong, demonstrable portfolio of applied project work) working with Large Language Models (LLMs), foundational models, or modern AI APIs.
• Demonstrated experience working with AI orchestration concepts (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar tooling) and a strong foundation in prompt engineering to build functional LLM-powered features.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with API integration, backend application development, and managing data pipelines.
• 2+ years of experience working with core development languages (such as Python) and handling modern software engineering workflows (CI/CD, testing frameworks, and version control).
• Other Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree (Master’s preferred) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an equivalent technical field.
• Product & Application Focus: A strong interest in user experience and a passion for applying AI capabilities to solve practical, real-world customer problems.
• Hands-on Orchestration: Familiarity with AI orchestration concepts, vector databases, semantic search, and prompt optimization techniques.
• Data Fluency: Experienced in handling data exploration, transformation, and integrating varied data sources to contextually ground AI outputs.
• Agile Collaboration: Proven ability to thrive in a team environment, collaborating closely with software developers, product managers, and UX designers.
• Curiosity & Growth Mindset: Eagerness to stay up to date with the rapid advancements in generative AI, autonomous agents, and LLM application design.
• 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: $173,000 USD - $259,000 USD
• Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $147,000 USD - $259,000 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.
• 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.
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