Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Workday Workday · Enterprise · Toronto, ON +1

Workday is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to design and build core ML systems for AI agents. This role involves owning the full lifecycle of LLM-powered agents, including RAG pipelines, orchestration, evaluation, and deployment within Workday's platform. The position requires strong engineering judgment, collaboration with cross-functional teams, and experience with large-scale ML systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. design and build the core ML systems behind Workday’s next generation of AI agents
  2. own how models, agent logic, and orchestration layers come together in production—across the full lifecycle from problem framing and data strategy to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement
  3. implement and evolve frameworks for LLM-powered agents, including RAG pipelines, workflow orchestration, evaluation, and feedback loops, ensuring solutions are scalable, observable, and enterprise-ready
  4. stay hands-on with emerging techniques in agentic architectures while applying strong engineering judgment to turn them into systems that are reliable, explainable, and built to operate at global scale

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years experience as a member of a data science, machine learning engineering, or other relevant software development team building applied machine learning products at scale, including taking products through applied research, design, implementation, production, and production-based evaluation
  • 4+ years of professional experience in machine learning and deep learning frameworks & toolkits such as Pytorch, TensorFlow
  • 6+ years of professional experience in building services to host machine learning models in production at scale
  • 3+ years of demonstrated experience working with large language models (LLMs), text generation models, and/or graph neural network models for real-world use cases
  • 6+ years of proven experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, etc.)
  • Proven track record of successfully leading, mentoring, and/or managing ML Engineering teams, taking ownership of development lifecycle and sprint planning; fostering a culture of collaboration, transparency, innovation, and continuous improvement
  • Deep understanding of statistical analysis, unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms, and natural language processing for information retrieval and/or recommendation system use cases
  • Professional experience in independently solving ambiguous, open-ended problems and technically leading teams
  • Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to build strong relationships across teams and stakeholders

Nice to have

  • Master’s or PhD preferred
  • Stay up to date with advancements in AI, LLMs, RAG, autonomous agents and orchestration frameworks to drive innovation

What the JD emphasized

  • production-grade AI
  • global scale
  • enterprise-ready
  • deeply embedded into Workday’s platform
  • own problems end to end
  • full lifecycle
  • scalable
  • observable
  • enterprise-ready
  • reliable
  • explainable
  • operate at global scale

Other signals

  • production-grade AI
  • intelligent agents
  • global scale
  • enterprise-ready