Senior Ontologist role on Samba TV's Knowledge Graph & Identity team. Responsible for design, development, and governance of semantic data models and ontological frameworks foundational to Samba's knowledge graph. Hands-on technical work includes designing ontologies, writing SPARQL, building knowledge graph pipelines, and collaborating with data engineering and data science teams. Leverage ML and AI techniques including embedding-based and LLM-augmented approaches for entity resolution and identity linking. Reports to Data Science Manager. Requires 5-8 years experience in ontology engineering or knowledge graph development, expertise in RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL 1.1, SHACL, and production triplestore experience. Strong Python skills and understanding of description logics and ontology design patterns required. Bachelor's degree required; Master's or PhD preferred. Responsibilities include ontology design and governance, event-to-ontology derivation, knowledge graph development and AI integration, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship.
What you'll do
Own design, development, and versioning of core ontologies in RDF/RDFS/OWL defining entity classes, properties, hierarchies, and constraints
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Requirements
5–8 years of hands-on experience in ontology engineering, semantic data modeling, or knowledge graph development with production ontologies at scale
Deep expertise in W3C semantic web standards: RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL 1.1, and SHACL
Hands-on experience building and validating graph schemas in a production triplestore (Amazon Neptune, Stardog, GraphDB, Jena, or equivalent)
Strong Python skills with production-quality, well-tested code; comfortable building data pipelines and graph processing workflows
First-principles understanding of description logics, ontology design patterns, and trade-offs between OWL expressivity and triplestore scalability
Hands-on experience with entity resolution, record linkage, or deduplication at scale
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or related field; Master's or PhD strongly preferred
Strong communication skills to defend ontological modeling decisions and explain trade-offs to non-specialists
