Principal Engineer, AI Production Readiness

The Architecture & AI (AAI) organization is a dynamic and evolving team that is spearheading Workday’s growth through trusted data excellence, innovation, and architectural thought leadership. Equipped with an array of skills in data & AI platforms and architecture, data science, engineering, machine learning and AI strategy & product management, this team orchestrates the flow of data across our growing company while ensuring data accessibility, accuracy, and security. With a relentless focus on innovation and efficiency, Workmates in AAI enable the transformation of complex data sets into actionable insights that fuel strategic decisions and position Workday at the forefront of the technology industry. We are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to own the technical path that carries internally built AI agents from prototype to enterprise-grade production on Workday’s Databricks and AWS estate. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of AI applications, data, identity and platform. You will design the architecture and work in code to build the reference implementations and evaluation harnesses that business-built applications are re-architected onto, and hold the technical bar as those applications move into production.

Responsibilities

Define and enforce production readiness standards and automated enforcement for AI applications; Own architecture patterns and paved-road assets for AI applications across Databricks and AWS stacks; Build and maintain reference implementations and deployment templates for recurring patterns; Work in code with AWS Bedrock, AgentCore, Databricks Agent Bricks and Unity Catalog to build prototypes, tool and system integrations, and re-architect AI-generated applications into production-ready services; Diagnose complex implementation challenges, reproduce failures, bisect regressions, trace latency/token cost, test hypotheses, and drive blockers to resolution; Run design and readiness reviews with platform, data, security and SRE partners, and own handoff to operations; Engage with business teams to translate needs into platform and data design, and translate platform constraints back into decisions; Provide cross-functional technical leadership as the technical counterpart

Requirements

8+ years of experience in Data & AI application development in a Python, IaC and CI/CD production environment; 8+ years of modern data stack experience (Databricks, AWS, Snowflake, GCP, or comparable technologies); 6+ years of professional experience with LLM applications in a major cloud AI-native stack; Excellent verbal and written communication skills; Ability to work in alignment with business teams to build applications and translate platform constraints back into decisions; Work with business counterparts and carry direction across partner functions on influence; Open to 50% reporting to our Toronto office

Benefits

Eligibility for Workday Bonus Plan or role-specific commission/bonus; annual refresh stock grants; Flex Work approach combining in-person and remote, with at least half (50%) of time in office/field; comprehensive benefits package