Principal, Machine Learning Software Engineer, Admin Central

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 Admin Central is building the future of how administrators work across Workday, turning a fragmented patchwork of tools and disconnected AI into a single, unified experience. Within Admin Central, Workday implementations move from being driven by human effort to being powered by intelligence designed into the platform. You’ll build mission-critical distributed systems, high-availability usage pipelines, new agentic functionality, and event-driven data flows across global product regions to ensure enterprise billing integrity at scale. If you're excited to build from scratch, move fast, and transform how thousands of admins work every day, come join us! About the Role As a Principal Software Engineer (ML/AI) on the Admin Central team, you will lead the architecture and implementation of Workday’s next-generation AI platforms and autonomous agent frameworks. You’ll sit at the intersection of machine learning, event-driven data systems, and enterprise platform engineering—transforming cutting-edge AI research into production-ready, highly reliable systems handling tens of millions of daily requests for hundreds of enterprise tenants. In this hands-on, high-impact role, you will design the ML infrastructure, multi-agent orchestration layers, and high-availability usage pipelines that power enterprise-grade decision-making, usage tracking, and automatic tenant maintenance. Your Primary Focus: • Agentic AI & Orchestration: Design, implement, and maintain advanced agentic capabilities, including tool calling, multi-agent workflows, long-range planning, reasoning frameworks, and human-in-the-loop integrations. • Scalable ML Infrastructure: Build secure, high-throughput REST services and event-driven data pipelines using Python, AWS, and cloud-native tech. Architect multi-tenant runtimes that deliver fast, low-latency inference to millions of global users. • MLOps & Enterprise Reliability: Establish end-to-end MLOps standards—including CI/CD automation, observability, evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, and privacy/anonymization guardrails—ensuring systems are explainable, secure, and production-resilient. • Technical & Strategic Leadership: Partner closely with software engineers, Product Managers, Data Engineering, SRE, and Legal/Compliance stakeholders to turn ambiguous business needs into scalable technical designs and long-term data-governance strategies. About You Basic Qualifications • 12+ years in ML development and R&D leadership, including 8+ years with advanced ML methodologies, distributed frameworks, and cloud-based platforms — designing complex, scala