Jobs / United States / Workday INC
Principal AI Researcher
Workday INC · 🇺🇸 3 Locations
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 255 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 103 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Workday INC
The US Department of Labor certified 255 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 103 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Workday INC →
About the role
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 Workday AI Research is a newly built, elite organization dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in AI to power the Agentic Enterprise. We sit at the heart of Agent Factory, Workday’s innovation hub. While Agent Factory builds the production-grade agents used by 65M+ people, the AI Research team discovers the fundamental breakthroughs that make those agents possible. We are a high-impact, "research-to-reality" team. We don’t just conduct experiments in a vacuum; we solve the hardest enterprise-level problems in reasoning, planning, and multi-modal understanding. As a founding member of this research arm, you will help shape our research culture, publication strategy, and the fundamental intelligence layer of the Workday platform. About the Role As a Principal AI Researcher, you will be a technical founder and visionary for the Workday AI Research Team. This is a role for a scientist-leader who thrives on defining the frontier rather than just following a roadmap. You will move the needle on how LLMs and autonomous agents function within the complex, high-trust environment of global enterprise data. You will bridge the gap between groundbreaking theory and massive-scale application. Your work will involve defining research roadmaps for agentic reasoning, long-horizon planning, and model alignment, ensuring that Workday remains the world leader in responsible, intelligent enterprise agents. Key Responsibilities: • Define research direction in Agentic AI and LLMs. • Advance the state of the art in agentic systems, including retrieval, grounding, memory, context, personalization, etc. • Foundational Model Research: Advance Workday’s proprietary capabilities in pre-training, post-training (RLHF, DPO), and domain-specific alignment for HR and Finance workflows. • Publish & Open Source: Lead Workday’s contribution to the global AI community through publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, etc.) and strategic open-source releases. • Research-to-Production Bridge: Partner with Agent Factory engineering pods to integrate SOTA research into production-ready services that scale to the world's largest organizations. • Mentorship & Culture: Act as a force multiplier for the newly formed research team, fostering a culture of scientific rigor, curiosity, and high-velocity experimentation. About You Basic Qualifications • 8+ years of experience in AI/ML research or applied science, with a proven history of taking products from applied research to global-scale production. • Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Math, Phy