Ontology & Semantic Architect

Responsibilities

• Ensuring strong semantic modeling, data design, and governance practices.
• Establish standards, processes, and operating models for consistent ontology creation, maintenance, and evolution.
• Serve as the primary decision-maker for semantic definitions, conceptual models, and enterprise vocabulary management.
• Oversee the design and maintenance of ontologies that accurately represent business concepts, relationships, hierarchies, and constraints.
• Partner with domain experts to ensure semantic models reflect real business processes and data usage patterns.
• Ensure ontologies support interoperability across applications, datasets, APIs, and analytic platforms.
• Guide the extension of ontologies to support new product lines, operational processes, or regulatory needs.
• Lead the creation and management of semantic models within Microsoft Fabric IQ, including domain modeling, semantic enrichment, and unified business definitions.
• Oversee the design and governance of Palantir Ontology artifacts, including object types, relationships, functions, schema transformations, and operational pipelines.
• Ensure consistency and alignment between semantic models implemented in Palantir and those implemented in Fabric.
• Drive best practices for building scalable data models, ontology-driven access patterns, and knowledge graph structures across platforms.
• Define the enterprise semantic architecture, including how ontologies integrate with data products, data pipelines, APIs, and AI/ML solutions.
• Establish and maintain a semantic layer strategy to ensure business-aligned meaning across systems.
• Promote an ontology-driven approach to data interoperability, lineage, data quality, and governance.
• Enable AI and ML teams by providing well-structured, semantically rich data environments.
• Collaborate on the development of AI agents and semantic reasoning features that depend on precise data meaning.
• Support use cases such as natural language querying, knowledge graph analytics, and intelligent automation.
• Partner with product teams, business stakeholders, data stewards, engineers, and analytics teams to ensure trusted data meaning across the enterprise.
• Act as the bridge between business conceptual understanding and technical implementation.
• Guide teams on how to use and extend ontology assets effectively in daily workflows.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Technology, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in data architecture, semantic modeling, knowledge representation, or related fields.
• Mastery in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data concepts, including the ability to assess feasibility and risk of AI use cases, design or coordinate workflow-level AI solutions, guide teams on responsible AI governance, mentor others, and contribute to organizational policies and ethical decision-making.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric.
• Hands-on experience with Palantir Foundry Ontology, including object modeling.
• Deep understanding of conceptual, logical, and semantic data modeling.
• Strong understanding of data governance, metadata management, data lineage, and interoperability principles.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to simplify complex data concepts for varied audiences.
• Occasional early morning or evening teleconferences.
• Availability and willingness to travel on company business based on requirements of the role (domestically and internationally).
• Preferred background in knowledge graphs, RDF/OWL, or semantic reasoning frameworks.
• Experience in designing semantic layers for BI, analytics, and AI use cases.
• Familiarity with API modeling, data contracts, or domain-driven design.
• Experience operating in distributed, highly cross-functional environments.