Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering

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.

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 a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Forward Intelligence organization spanning developer experience tooling, continuous evaluation infrastructure, and applied/field engineering. You will manage technical leads and senior engineers across each pillar, set the cross-functional roadmap for how domain knowledge becomes production-grade AI skills, and own the organizational health, hiring, and career growth of a multi-pillar engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Manage technical leads and senior engineers across the DevEx & Pipeline, AI Evaluation, and Applied Engineering pillars.
• Establish and enforce the engineering standards for skill authoring, prompt architecture, API integration, and schema compliance across the org.
• Ensure Evaluation-Driven Development — benchmark datasets, LLM-as-a-Judge scoring, trajectory trace analysis, CI/CD quality gates - is consistently applied across every pillar before skills reach production.
• Own the escalation path for production telemetry and drift analysis, ensuring trajectory failures and regressions are caught, triaged, and fed back into eval suites and authoring standards.
• Act as the primary point of contact for business-unit leaders and senior consultants on skill coverage, prioritization, and enablement, translating their needs into engineering commitments.
• Recruit, develop, and retain technical leads and senior engineers with a clear path for ICs to grow into leads as the org matures.

Requirements

• Basic Qualifications
• 5+ years experience leading and developing software development engineering teams.
• 10+ years of total professional software engineering experience, providing enough technical depth to set direction and make credible calls across DevEx, evaluation, and field deployment disciplines.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline; Master's degree preferred or equivalent practical experience.
• 1+ years of exposure to generative AI, LLM-based systems, or agentic architectures, sufficient to direct technical strategy without needing to be the deepest specialist in any one pillar.
• Other Qualifications
• Strong technical communication and interpersonal skills to collaborate effectively with non-technical domain experts and translate requirements into clean technical specs.
• Proven ability to build, structure, and grow a multi-pillar engineering org, including making or informing leveling decisions for Senior-level ICs.
• Track record partnering with business-unit leaders, senior consultants, and executive stakeholders to translate ambiguous business needs into a coherent engineering roadmap.
• Technical Breadth Across AI/Agentic Systems: Working fluency across developer tooling, CI/CD evaluation pipelines, and AI systems.
• Experience mentoring Senior engineers toward future technical leadership and building the bench needed to eventually justify Staff/Principal-level promotions.
• 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 and deliver high-impact capabilities in rapid iteration cycles.
• 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 .
• Primary Location Base Pay Range: €110,400 EUR - €165,600 EUR Ireland
• 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.
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