Senior Director, AI Context & Semantics Platform

Workday; Pleasanton (CA); Hybrid; USD 282,000 - 422,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday is seeking a Senior Director of Context and Semantics Engineering to lead the vision, architecture, and delivery of the intelligence layer powering Workday’s AI Agents. You will scale an engineering organization to build scalable semantic engines, RAG pipelines, vector search, and context-management systems.

You will ensure enterprise data bridges with AI models, enabling grounded, secure, and context-aware agent reasoning at scale across HR and Finance domains.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience in distributed systems, search architectures, data platforms, or AI infrastructure.
• 5+ years of senior engineering leadership experience, directing managers and large teams (50+ engineers).
• 3+ years of direct experience leading AI/ML infrastructure, semantic search engines, or knowledge graphs.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale an engineering organization focused on AI context, semantic architecture, and data orchestration.
• Define and drive the technical roadmap for the AI semantic layer and related infrastructures.
• Oversee enterprise-grade RAG pipelines, real-time data grounding, and tenant-isolated HR/Finance data handling.
• Partner with VP/C‑level stakeholders to integrate context engines across AI Agent Factory and Sana experiences.
• Shape memory and context management for multi-turn enterprise workflows in AI agents.
• Establish data privacy, RBAC, and governance standards for enterprise AI.
• Evaluate and adopt cutting-edge AI data tech to scale Workday’s AI platform.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

AI infrastructure

Search architectures

LLM orchestration

Data platforms

Mentoring managers

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/Engineering

PhD is a plus

Tools

Elasticsearch

Pinecone

Milvus

Neo4j

Job description

Workday is seeking a Senior Director of Context and Semantics Engineering to lead the vision, architecture, and delivery of the intelligence layer powering Workday’s AI Agents. You will scale an engineering organization to build scalable semantic engines, RAG pipelines, vector search, and context-management systems.

You will ensure enterprise data bridges with AI models, enabling grounded, secure, and context-aware agent reasoning at scale across HR and Finance domains.