Senior AI Context & Semantics Engineer (RAG & LLMs)

Workday, Inc.; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Context and Semantics to architect and scale the backend systems powering AI Agents. You will design end-to-end RAG pipelines, embedding generation, and vector search integrations across transactional and analytical stores.

You will lead and mentor engineers, optimize low-latency retrieval, and ensure secure, governed AI execution at scale in a hybrid work model based in Pleasanton, CA.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering in backend or distributed systems.
• 5+ years of hands-on programming in Java, Python, Scala, or Go.
• 1+ years building production-grade LLM apps, RAG pipelines, or vector search.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field; Master’s preferred.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and deploy robust backend services and data pipelines.
• Design and optimize enterprise-grade RAG pipelines with embedding generation.
• Build distributed query execution layers to fetch context across data stores.
• Develop LLM orchestration workflows for multi-turn agent reasoning.
• Embed data security, tenant isolation, and RBAC into retrieval layers.
• Lead code/design reviews and propagate engineering best practices.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Java

Python

Go

LLM apps

RAG pipelines

Vector search

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's preferred

Tools

Trino/LDQ

Pinecone

Milvus

Elasticsearch

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Job description

Workday is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Context and Semantics to architect and scale the backend systems powering AI Agents. You will design end-to-end RAG pipelines, embedding generation, and vector search integrations across transactional and analytical stores.

You will lead and mentor engineers, optimize low-latency retrieval, and ensure secure, governed AI execution at scale in a hybrid work model based in Pleasanton, CA.