Workday

Machine Learning Engineer III

Workday$160K — $240K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 3+ years of experience in production-grade ML systems including deep learning and NLP.
  • Expertise in generative AI and agentic systems, specifically with NLP and LLM products.
  • 2+ years of strong Python programming experience, focusing on scalable system architecture.
  • Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in a quantitative field or strong research portfolio.
  • Proficiency in optimization techniques and large-scale data processing using PySpark and SQL.

Responsibilities

  • Design and deploy sophisticated reasoning and planning agents for enterprise data.
  • Develop algorithms for automated optimization in agent graphs and build recommender systems.
  • Construct hybrid search systems and semantic parsing products with vector search capabilities.
  • Engineer cloud-based pipelines for rigorous evaluation and monitoring.
  • Oversee the entire MLOps process from exploration to production deployment.
  • Identify ML opportunities and propose solutions while integrating best practices.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally to deliver AI-first products with ownership of your projects.

Benefits

  • People-first culture that fosters work-life balance and sustainability.
  • Opportunity to work with exclusive, high-integrity datasets not commonly available to researchers.
  • Ability to impact decision-making for over 31 million users at Fortune 500 companies.
  • Flexible work approach enabling at least 50% in-office time each quarter to strengthen team connections.
Full Job Description

About the Team

Do you want to build AI-powered software that impacts millions of people every day? The AI Core team, part of Workday’s AI Platform organization, tackles challenging problems at the intersection of machine learning, agentic reasoning, and enterprise-scale systems. Our work delivers critical AI platform capabilities and differentiated, deep-value agent applications.

About the Role

As a Machine Learning Engineer on the AI Core team, you will develop tailored user experiences using advanced Agentic AI, LLMs and RAG. You will collaborate with other engineers to deliver ML solutions across Workday’s product ecosystem and use current software and data engineering stacks to enable training, deployment, and lifecycle management of a variety of ML models; supervised and unsupervised. Additionally, you will develop and deploy new APIs/services using Docker/Kubernetes at scale and leverage Workday’s vast computing resources on rich datasets to deliver transformative value to our customers. Sound like your kind of challenge?

You are a strong technical leader with deep Python expertise and solid software engineering skills, capable of writing beautiful, well-designed code while delivering solutions efficiently. Specifically, you will:

  • Own exploration, design and implementation of features for our sophisticated ML platforms, pipelines and services.

  • Be responsible for evaluation, scalability and observability of these features.

  • Apply machine learning techniques including LLMs and natural language understanding to analyze large sets of HR and Finance-related text data, and design and launch pioneering cloud-based machine learning architectures

  • Stay up to date with advancements in AI, LLMs, RAG, autonomous agents and orchestration frameworks to drive innovation

  • Serve as a technical role model for more junior engineers

About You

Basic Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s (Master’s or PhD preferred) degree in engineering, data/computer science, physics, math or equivalent

  • 3+ yrs 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

  • 3+ years of professional experience with Python and supporting numeric libraries, with experience in shipping production code and models

  • 3+ years of professional experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP, etc.)

Other Qualifications:

  • 3+ years of professional experience in building information retrieval systems and/or graph-based recommendation systems.

  • 3+ years of hands-on professional experience in developing large language models (LLMs), text generation models, or graph-based machine learning models for production, including data processing, model fine-tuning, model deployment and model evaluation

  • 3+ years of professional experience building services to host machine learning models in production at scale

  • 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning and deep learning frameworks & toolkits such as PySpark, Pytorch, TensorFlow, and Sklearn

  • 3+ years of professional experience with data engineering and data wrangling using e.g. Pandas and PySpark and other industry tools used to build scalable machine learning systems, such as Kubernetes and Docker

  • 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 team


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 .

Primary Location: USA.CA.PleasantonPrimary Location Base Pay Range: $160,000 USD - $240,000 USD


Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $136,200 USD - $240,000 USD



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 4home office4 roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

About Workday

Workday, Inc. is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. The Company delivers financial management, human capital management and analytics applications designed for various companies, educational institutions and government agencies. As part of its applications, the Company provides embedded analytics that capture the content and context of everyday business events, facilitating informed decision-making from wherever users are working. Its applications include Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Other Applications. It also provides open, standards-based Web-services application programming interfaces, and pre-built packaged integrations and connectors. Workday, Inc. is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.
Learn more about Workday
Size
15,932 employees
Market Cap
$42.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$282.4 million
Founded
2005
5 Year Trend
+26.7%
Revenue
$4.3 billion
NASDAQ

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