Jobs in Pleasanton, CA

About the role

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.

What you'll bring

• 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 large organizations, 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.
• 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.
• Ph.D. is a plus