Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering

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 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. Key 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. • Re