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Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Workday · USA
Job Description
Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Location: USA, CA, Pleasanton · Flex
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 Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, and customer execution across Agent Factory, Sana, Products, and the Developer Platform. When Workday launches new AI agents and products, early deployments surface complex real-world challenges—from unstructured tenant data and intricate configurations to edge-case enterprise workflows.FDE pods deploy directly into active customer engagements to resolve technical friction, debug complex setups, and build lightweight integrations. Crucially, FDEs serve as the primary feedback engine for Product and Engineering: field insights, recurring customer friction, and configuration patterns are converted directly into scalable, out-of-the-box product capabilities.
About the Role
As the Forward Deployed (FDE) Manager, you will lead one or more FDE pods, reporting into the SVP who owns Workday’s Data Cloud platform portfolio. You are accountable for the health of the FDE operating model within your pods: making sure your engineers are deployed against the right customer engagements, that their time compounds into permanent product improvements rather than one-off delivery work, and that each engagement moves cleanly through selection, kick-off, and exit.
You will manage people on software engineering career ladders, coach them through fast-moving, ambiguous customer engagements, and partner closely with Product Management, Engineering leadership, Workday Services leads, AI Deployment Architects, and Account Teams. You are the escalation point that keeps your FDEs focused on product-hardening work, and the internal voice that turns field evidence into roadmap decisions.
What you'll do
- Hire, coach, and develop a high performing group of FDEs. Own pod staffing and allocation across 2–4 pods (~10 customer projects per pod), matching FDE skills to the right engagements.
- Run the engagement lifecycle, ensure FDEs are engaged in high value projects and track and report progress of your products toward a graduation scorecard (includes metrics such as live and reference-able customer counts, time to deploy/configure without FDE support, customer and support readiness etc) in partnership with the PAO team.
- Partner with Workday Services leads, AI Deployment Architects, Account Teams (AE/MP/CSM), and Product Managers to keep each engagement properly resourced and the FDE's time focused on product hardening rather than broader account management.
- Ensure the product feedback loop operates at pod level: field telemetry, recurring friction, and configuration patterns are captured, triaged, and routed into the product and engineering backlog so fixes become standard, automated capabilities.
- Build and share playbooks, configuration patterns, and known-issue guides across your pods, and hand them off to the teams that scale deployments once a product graduates.
About You
Basic Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, Software Development, or Product/Program Management within complex enterprise environments, including direct, hands-on work with enterprise customers.
- 5+ years of experience managing, leading, or coaching technical teams (direct people management or demonstrated technical/team leadership of engineers in customer-facing or field-deployment settings).
- Technical depth sufficient to review and guide hands-on engineering work: solid understanding of coding and debugging (e.g., Python, Java, or similar), REST APIs, system architecture, and integration patterns.
- Proven experience managing multiple concurrent, complex software deployments or customer engagements in parallel, including live data troubleshooting and custom workflow integration.
Other Qualifications
- Product mindset: skilled at abstracting generalizable product requirements from bespoke customer issues, and at turning pod-level patterns into roadmap input.
- Stakeholder management: experience managing strategic relationships with senior leaders in key accounts and internally across Product, Engineering, and Services — setting and resetting expectations, navigating organizational change, and rebuilding trust when an engagement hits a rough patch.
- Exceptional verbal and written communication; skilled at translating complex technical and customer context for senior internal and customer leadership.
- Comfortable with ambiguity and fast-changing requirements across Product, Engineering, and Services teams; highly collaborative, low-ego operator within multi-disciplinary account and delivery pods.
Preferred Qualifications
- Applied experience with LLM-powered or agentic AI systems — e.g., prompt/context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluations, or agent orchestration frameworks — and a working understanding of how model behavior shows up as product and customer-facing issues in the field.
- Working knowledge of Workday, including business processes, security and permissions, tenant configuration, integrations, and how customers implement and govern Workday.
Workday Pay Transparency Statement
The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a 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. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.
Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton
Our Approach to Flexible Work
With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.
Pursuant to applicable Fair Chance law, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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