Senior Context and Semantics Engineering Director, Workday
Artificial Intelligence
$281.6-422.4k
More information about location
Office located in Pleasanton, CA
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR, finance & IT
Be an early applicant
Enterprise AI platform for managing HR, finance & IT
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$281.6-422.4k
More information about location
Office located in Pleasanton, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To leverage the power of AI to elevate humans and supercharge work, moving business forever forward.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience with a strong background in distributed systems, search architectures, data platforms, or AI infrastructure
- 5+ years of senior engineering leadership experience (Director level or above), with a proven track record of managing managers, scaling organizations (50+ engineers), and delivering mission-critical enterprise systems
- 3+ years of direct experience leading teams that build AI/ML infrastructure, semantic search engines, LLM orchestration layers, vector databases, or Knowledge Graphs
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (Ph.D. is a plus)
- Deep architectural understanding of how to bridge structured enterprise data with unstructured AI models (RAG architectures, embedding generation, chunking strategies, and semantic routing)
- Experience building and scaling Semantic Layers, Ontologies, or enterprise-scale Search/Retrieval systems (e.g., Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Milvus, Neo4j)
- Strong executive presence and communication skills, with the ability to translate complex AI and data concepts into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders
- Product-first mindset with a relentless focus on delivering high-reliability, low-latency infrastructure that powers real-time AI user experiences
- Experience operating within highly regulated data environments (Finance/HR) and implementing AI guardrails for enterprise-grade security
- Experience with the Workday platform and architecture is a strong plus
What the job involves
- The Data Cloud organization is at the forefront of Workday’s next major wave of innovation, driven by a bold mandate to build the industry’s first true Platform for Agents
- We are a high-energy, ambitious team that balances Workday's deep foundational expertise with fresh, forward-thinking perspectives to accelerate our pace of delivery and unlock massive new commercial value
- By leveraging Workday’s unique business context, trusted data, and identity guardrails, we are building the critical engine that will power the future of AI and agentic workflows across the enterprise
- As a team, we value organizational clarity, deep cross-functional collaboration, and rapid execution, working together to evolve our architecture and aggressively scale our impact in the market
- Join the Data Cloud organization, where we are building the intelligent foundation for Workday's next generation of AI Agents
- The Context and Semantics Engineering team is the brain trust responsible for making our AI "enterprise-aware
- " We build the semantic layers, knowledge graphs, and dynamic context engines that ground generative AI in real-world HR and Finance data
- By bridging the gap between raw enterprise data and large language models (LLMs), our team ensures that Workday’s autonomous agents can reason accurately, securely, and with deep contextual awareness at a global scale
- As the Senior Director of Context and Semantics Engineering, you will be a key engineering executive driving the vision, architecture, and delivery of the intelligence layer powering Workday’s AI Agents
- You will lead and scale an engineering organization to build highly scalable semantic engines, advanced RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, vector search infrastructure, and dynamic context-management systems
- Sitting at the critical intersection of data architecture and applied AI, you will ensure that our foundational models seamlessly understand and reason over complex, highly regulated enterprise workflows
- This is a high-visibility, high-impact role requiring a visionary leader who can scale organizations, navigate technical ambiguity, and deliver production-grade AI infrastructure that sets the industry standard for Enterprise AI
- Organizational Leadership: Build, scale, and mentor a world-class engineering organization dedicated to AI context, semantic architecture, and data orchestration
- Strategic Technical Vision: Define and execute the technical roadmap for Workday’s AI semantic layer, encompassing vector databases, knowledge graphs, enterprise ontologies, and semantic search capabilities
- AI & RAG Infrastructure: Lead the development of enterprise-grade RAG pipelines, ensuring LLMs are grounded in real-time, accurate, and tenant-isolated HR and Finance data to eliminate hallucinations and drive agentic reasoning
- Cross-Functional Executive Partnership: Collaborate tightly with VP/C-level stakeholders across AI/ML Engineering, Product Management, and Platform Architecture to seamlessly integrate context engines into the broader AI Agent Factory and Sana experiences
- Context & Memory Management: Drive the engineering design for agentic memory, state management, and conversational context, allowing our AI agents to seamlessly handle multi-turn, complex user workflows
- Responsible & Governed AI: Enforce rigorous technical standards for data privacy, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and compliance, ensuring that context fed to AI models strictly adheres to enterprise security boundaries
- Innovation & Scale: Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge AI data technologies and orchestration frameworks (e.g., advanced embedding models, GraphRAG, LlamaIndex, LangChain) to future-proof Workday's AI platform at massive scale
Our take
Workday is a cloud-based software vendor that provides management of workforces and finances. The company uses a single database for workforce management and financial management to offer integration and optimize business intelligence across companies. It has added to the packages and tools it offers over the years, providing analytic options that allow companies to combine third-party data with information collected by Workday.
The company has also grown through acquisitions and partnerships to broaden its capabilities. Most recently, in 2025 it purchases Sana, an AI-driven enterprise knowledge and learning platform, to create a "new front door for work". This acquisition allows Workday to integrate Sana's AI-powered search, agents, and learning capabilities with its own data and workflows, allowing employees to access information, automate tasks, and complete their day entirely within Workday.
Through a combination of strategic acquisitions and in-house development, Workday has built a comprehensive suite of HR, financial, and enterprise tools. By focusing on innovation and AI-driven workflows, the company continues to push productivity and decision-making for organizations worldwide. Building on this track record, Workday is very much positioned for even more growth, reinforcing its status as a leader in shaping the future of work.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Oct 2011
$85m
SERIES F
Apr 2009
$75m
SERIES E
Total funding: $215.3m
Company HQ
Pleasanton, CA
Leadership
Aneel Bhusri
(Co-Founder & CEO)Annel began their career at Morgan Stanley as a Corporate Finance Analyst. They then spent nearly 6 years at PeopleSoft as a Senior VP before co-founding Workday in 2005.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 97 more jobs at Workday