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 exec