Ontology Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain ontologies in OWL, extending Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Common Core Ontologies (CCO), to represent engineering concepts across multiple disciplines and domains.
• Maintain namespace and identifier conventions, modular organization of ontology content, versioning, and dependency relationships between ontology modules.
• Establish conventions for aligning model elements from MBSE tools (e.g., Cameo/MagicDraw, SysML) and other engineering tools with ontology classes, supporting consistent semantic tagging across tools.
• Develop validation logic (e.g., SHACL or equivalent schema validation) and apply reasoning to check ontology consistency and data conformance.
• Author queries (e.g., SPARQL or equivalent) to support traceability, impact analysis, and reporting needs.
• Define and document ontology governance practices: modeling conventions, review and approval processes, reuse principles, and onboarding guidance for engineering teams and tool integrators.
• Collaborate with systems engineers, software developers, and tool integration teams to ensure ontologies meet practical, real-world data exchange needs across MBSE, PLM, simulation, and other engineering tools.
• Communicate ontology design decisions and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10-15 years in systems engineering, knowledge representation, or digital engineering, with demonstrated ontology development on complex engineered systems.
• Demonstrated experience developing ontologies for complex engineered systems, with evidence of applying that work in a practical or production context.
• Hands-on expertise with formal ontology representation (e.g., OWL/RDFS) and/or property graph schema design, along with corresponding query and validation approaches (e.g., SPARQL/SHACL, or Gremlin/Cypher and schema validation tooling).
• Practical experience with ontology editing tools such as Protégé.
• Working knowledge of BFO and CCO.
• Experience with at least one graph-based data store used to host ontology or linked data (e.g., a triplestore such as GraphDB, Stardog, or Apache Jena Fuseki; or a property graph database such as Neo4j or JanusGraph).
• Working knowledge of MBSE concepts and tools (e.g., Cameo/MagicDraw, SysML) sufficient to align model data with ontology structures.
• Programming proficiency in Python for ontology tooling, automation, and validation pipelines.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate ontology concepts for engineers and stakeholders without formal ontology backgrounds.
• U.S. Citizen with an active DoD Secret clearance, able to obtain and maintain a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Information Science, Philosophy/Logic, or similar).
• Master’s or PhD in related field preferred.