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 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.
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.
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 execution.
•Logic Optimization & Deduplication: Abstract messy business procedures into clean, modular logic—separating prose from executable code while optimizing prompt structures for minimal token consumption and maximum execution reliability.
•Edge-Case Stress Testing: Design and implement automated test suites to stress-test skill edge cases, API parameter bounds, fallback logic, and error-handling routines before deployment.
•Enablement & Code Review: Scale authoring standards across Workday by establishing best practices, training domain experts on self-serve authoring workflows, and reviewing submitted skill pull requests for schema compliance and API integrity.
•Enforce Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD): Partner with Domain Experts to curate benchmark eval datasets, implementing LLM-as-a-Judge scoring, trajectory trace analysis, and CI/CD quality gates to validate skill accuracy and prevent regressions prior to production promotion.
•Production Telemetry & Drift Analysis: Establish feedback loops using production agent trace logs to identify trajectory failures, update eval benchmark suites, and continuously improve skill deterministic behavior.
Requirements
•4+ years of professional software engineering experience in Python or TypeScript with a focus on API integrations, backend services, or scripting.
•1+ years of hands-on experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code) to author, refactor, and debug production code.
•Strong experience working with REST APIs, JSON/YAML schemas, and structured data transformations.
•Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
•Strong technical communication and interpersonal skills to collaborate effectively with non-technical domain experts and translate requirements into clean technical specs.
•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 (e.g., moving from HR payroll logic to complex tax or financial workflows) and deliver high-impact capabilities in rapid iteration cycles.
•Experience building or operating LLM evaluation frameworks (e.g., Ragas, DeepEval, Braintrust, LangSmith, or custom assertion suites) to benchmark tool-calling accuracy, prompt drift, and agent success rates.
Compensation
Primary Location Base Pay Range: €72,000 EUR - €108,000 EUR (Ireland). As 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.
Flexible Work
With Flex Work, Workday combines in-person time and remote work. Rather than a number of required days in-office each week, teams spend at least half (50%) of their time each quarter in the office or in the field with customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role), with the freedom to create a flexible schedule around business, team, and personal needs.
