Principal AI Knowledge AI Architect (San Mateo)

Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of solutions that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done.

Theres another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.

At Freshworks, we build uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional customer and employee experiences. Our enterprise-grade solutions are powerful, yet easy to use, and quick to deliver results. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, making employees more effective and organizations more productive. Over 72,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) software to fuel customer loyalty and service efficiency. And, over 4,500 Freshworks employees make this possible, all around the world.

Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Job Description

We are seeking a Principal AI Knowledge AI Architect to design and lead the architecture for next-generation knowledge and RAG systems that enable reasoning-driven AI assistants to deliver precise, contextually relevant answers at scale. This role focuses on advanced RAG pipelines leveraging ontologies, dynamic content ingestion, agentic retrieval, data synchronization with enterprise platforms, and continuous knowledge health monitoring to ensure high-fidelity, trustworthy knowledge delivery.

You will architect the knowledge layer of our AI Agentic Platform, integrating enterprise content repositories, knowledge bases, APIs, and external tools into an agent-driven reasoning and retrieval engine.

Key Responsibilities:

Advanced RAG Architecture

• Architect and implement multi-layer RAG pipelines leveraging ontologies, semantic graphs, embeddings, and hybrid retrieval strategies.
• Design agentic RAG workflows where autonomous agents reason about query decomposition, multi-hop retrieval, and context stitching for better factual accuracy.
• Build hierarchical and ontology-based knowledge graphs to improve entity resolution, semantic search, and contextual reasoning.
• Optimize retrieval for domain-specific knowledge using structured + unstructured data fusion.
• Lead development of content ingestion pipelines for enterprise sources (Confluence, SharePoint, Google Drive, Salesforce KB, ServiceNow KB, etc.)
• Design real-time data sync connectors and ETL frameworks to keep knowledge sources fresh and in sync with external systems.
• Implement document parsing, enrichment, chunking, metadata tagging, and semantic indexing pipelines at scale.

Agentic Knowledge & Reasoning Integration

• Architect agentic knowledge workflows where agents autonomously evaluate, retrieve, and cross-reference multi-source knowledge.
• Enable agents to invoke external APIs/tools dynamically to complement RAG with transactional or dynamic information retrieval.

Knowledge Quality & Health Monitoring

• Develop knowledge health check pipelines to automatically validate knowledge freshness, detect stale or redundant articles, and recommend updates.
• Implement automated knowledge evaluation using LLMs (hallucination detection, coverage analysis, answer accuracy).
• Define governance policies for knowledge versioning, lifecycle management, and auditing.

Scalability, Security & Compliance

• Architect multi-tenant, enterprise-ready knowledge systems with strict access controls, encryption, and compliance (SOC2, HIPPA, GDPR).
• Ensure cost-efficient vector database and embedding management strategies (e.g., partitioning, caching, tiered storage).

Thought Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor engineers on best practices for RAG pipelines, knowledge representation, and semantic search.
• Work with product leadership to define long-term knowledge strategy for powering enterprise-grade agentic AI assistants.
• Collaborate closely with LLM engineers on optimizing retrieval-planning-generation loops for factual accuracy and latency.

Please note: This is a hybrid role that will be based in San Mateo, CA, or Bellevue, WA, and requires an in-office presence three days per week (Tuesday - Thursday).

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in software architecture, with at least 3+ years in AI-driven knowledge systems, RAG pipelines, or semantic search
• Deep expertise in retrieval techniques (vector search, hybrid search, ontology-based retrieval) and knowledge graph design
• Experience with ontology design and reasoning (OWL, SPARQL, etc.) for enterprise knowledge modeling
• Proven experience building RAG pipelines with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, LLaMA, etc.) integrated into production systems
• Strong proficiency in Java & Python and AI/ML frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, etc.)
• Knowledge of vector DBs (Pinecone, ElasticSearch, etc.) and graph DBs (Neo4j, etc.)
• Experience building enterprise knowledge ingestion frameworks from CMS/CRM/ITSM platforms (e.g, Salesforce, ServiceNow)
• Background in document parsing (OCR, PDFs, HTML), metadata enrichment, and semantic embeddings
• Expertise in scalable cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, event-driven microservices, streaming pipelines)
• Understanding of agentic AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph) and their integration with retrieval for reasoning

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with self-healing knowledge pipelines (auto-detection and repair of broken links, stale knowledge)
• Strong grounding in AI safety and governance for enterprise knowledge systems
• Contributes to open-source RAG or knowledge graph frameworks are a plus
• Familiarity with multi-modal knowledge retrieval (image/document embeddings and cross-modal search)

Additional Information

The annual base salary range for this position is $260,500 - $374,440.

Compensation is based on a variety of factors including but not limited to location, experience, job-related skills, and level. Bonus/equity may be available.

Freshworks offers multiple options for dental, medical, vision, disability and life insurances. Equity + ESPP, flexible PTO, flexible spending, commuter benefits and wellness benefits are also offered. Freshworks also offers adoption and parental leave benefits.

At Freshworks, we are creating a global workplace that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion irrespective of their background, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. We are committed to providing equal opportunity for all and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer work environment that advances the goals of our employees, communities and the business.

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