Principal Machine Learning Engineer (Gen AI)

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

Are you energized by seeing AI products come to life in real-world settings—especially when they directly impact how companies plan their workforce and finances?
At Workday, our Adaptive Planning organization is on a mission to reimagine the FP&A customer journey with an AI-first attitude. We serve thousands of the world’s largest enterprises, and now we're building agentic workflows that will transform how finance teams interact with planning systems—making them more intelligent, proactive, and efficient.
We’re looking for highly creative, results-driven, and deeply technical AI/ML Engineers to help us shape the future of financial planning. If you're passionate about building real production-grade AI that solves complex business problems and delivers measurable impact—this is your team!

About the Role

Are you driven to apply innovative AI to real-world enterprise challenges? As an AI/ML Engineer on the Workday Adaptive Planning team, you’ll help redefine how financial planning is done at scale—by designing and building intelligent, agentic workflows that power the next generation of FP&A solutions.
You’ll be at the forefront of bringing "AI-first" thinking into production, developing enterprise level intelligent systems that automate, adapt, and assist users throughout the financial planning journey. Your work will directly impact thousands of global enterprises and millions of end users.

What You’ll Do:

• Technical leadership: lead design and development of sophisticated AI agents that reason, learn, and interact across complex business processes to enhance productivity and decision-making. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

• Integrate AI Frameworks: Embed secure, scalable, and reliable agentic capabilities into core Adaptive Planning features—driving smart automation for FP&A users.

• Partner Cross-Functionally: Collaborate with extraordinary engineers and product managers to bring ideas to life—from concept to customer impact.

• ​Own Projects End-to-End: Lead the full AI development lifecycle—problem framing, data prep, model training, deployment, evaluation, and continuous improvement.

• Leverage Rich Planning Data: Harness Workday Adaptive Planning’s vast enterprise datasets to tune and optimize your AI models for high-value outcomes.

• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance to other engineers. Conduct critical code reviews and unblock the team on deep technical hurdles.

We’re looking for bold thinkers with strong technical chops and a product mindset. You’ll need to move fast, think big, and stay grounded in solving real customer problems through AI. If this sounds like your kind of challenge, we’d love to talk.

About You

Basic Qualifications - Principal (P5) MLE:

• 10+ years experience working on a data science, machine learning or related software development team.

• 8+ years experience with Python supporting numeric libraries, with experience in shipping secure, production code and models.

• 8+ years of experience object oriented programming in Java

• 2+ years experience in machine learning or deep learning frameworks or AI agent frameworks

Basic Qualifications - Sr. (P4) MLE:

• 5+ years experience working on a data science, machine learning or related software development team.

• 5+ years experience with Python supporting numeric libraries, with experience in shipping secure, production code and models.

• 5+ years of experience object oriented programming in Java

• 2+ years experience in machine learning and deep learning frameworks & toolkits such as Pytorch and Sklearn

Other Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, such as Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering.

• PhD or MS degree in a relevant field, such as Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering. Publications in machine learning research are highly desirable.

• Extensive experience with generative models, large language models (LLM), retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems, transformer neural networks, and related frameworks. 

• Experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP), containerization technologies (e.g. Docker) and data engineering pipelines (e.g. ETL)

• Experience developing and deploying machine learning solutions using large-scale datasets, including specification design, data collection and labeling, model development, validation, deployment, and ongoing monitoring.

• An ability to balance speed with delivering high-quality, practical solutions. Shown perseverance in overcoming significant problems.

#LI-JH1

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.CO.Boulder

 

Primary Location Base Pay Range: $200,600 USD - $301,000 USD

 

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $190,600 USD - $342,000 USD

Additional Considerations:

06/01/2026

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.

Workday is an Equal Opportunity Employer including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

At Workday, we are committed to providing an accessible and inclusive hiring experience where all candidates can fully demonstrate their skills. If you require assistance or an accommodation at any point, please email [email protected].

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