Director, Product Manager, Context Engine – Data Cloud

Workday•Pleasanton, CA

5d•$196,100 - $348,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Data Cloud organization is seeking a visionary, deeply technical Director, Product Manager to lead the internal development of our Universal Context Engine. This individual will drive the product strategy and execution for bridging Workday’s structured enterprise data with unstructured documents, creating a unified knowledge graph and semantic layer for our AI platform. This role involves defining advanced semantic routing, temporal reasoning capabilities, and declarative operational schemas to enable safe, trusted AI agents at scale. The Director, Product Manager will act as the pivotal leader connecting cutting-edge engineering capabilities with strict enterprise business constraints, unlocking a new frontier of value for our premium Data Cloud offerings and establishing long-term ecosystem gravity. As the Director, Product Manager for the Context Engine, you will own the multi-year vision and roadmap for the foundational context layer of the Workday Data Cloud. You will bridge complex data modalities, define reliable query execution paths, and enable secure, autonomous agentic workflows.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in technical product management, data platform strategy, software engineering, or equivalent
BA, BS, or equivalent degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
Deep experience in an enterprise SaaS and large-scale data platform environment
Knowledge graph, semantic layer, or LLM-routing focused experience, with a strong background working closely with foundational engineering and AI teams
Demonstrated experience in taking complex, zero-to-one technical capabilities from concept to enterprise-grade execution
Ability to collaborate across teams to create strategic storyboards and product roadmaps for executive and highly technical audiences
Ability to learn quickly within a fast-paced team, including diving deep into highly technical topics (e.g., deterministic SQL compilers, temporal reasoning, and early-binding security)
Ability to handle interpersonal relationships with a high degree of emotional intelligence and self-awareness

Responsibilities

Lead the multi-year vision, roadmap, and core platform requirements for the internal build of the Universal Context Engine, integrating deeply with our core query and data lake architectures.
Translate high-level architectural needs into rigorous operational execution, ensuring absolute clarity, engineering focus, and measurable business outcomes for our AI data layer.
Anchor third-party developers and partners to Workday by establishing a trusted, governed context layer that serves as a strict technical prerequisite for premium, autonomous operational agents.
Define capabilities for dynamic entity mapping, seamlessly bridging structured enterprise data with unstructured assets and documents into a single, queryable enterprise fabric.
Collaborate with engineering to build highly scalable translation layers that accurately convert natural language intent into optimized query execution paths, cleanly delegating processing down to our data gateways.
Architect a secure write-path for autonomous agents by defining rule engines and API integrations that bind strict business logic and governance directly to agentic action schemas.
Pioneer dynamic security and filtering mechanisms that evaluate user identity and access policies to optimize the context space prior to LLM interaction, improving system performance and mitigating hallucination risks.
Architect product requirements for advanced knowledge graphs capable of natively understanding complex, time-bound enterprise data models to securely support real-time agentic eventing.
Act as a strategic partner to Data Cloud engineering, graph architects, and AI platform teams to ensure scalable, high-performance execution without legacy technical debt.
Partner with broader Workday ecosystem teams (including Workday Extend) to expose standardized APIs and framework gateways, ensuring our semantic context is safely accessible to first-party and approved third-party agents.
Serve as the connective tissue between platform engineering and GTM teams to ensure our trusted context layer translates directly into the monetization of premium Data Cloud offerings and continuous compute consumption.