Principal Software Architect, Building Ontology

Responsibilities

• Ontology & Semantic Model Development
• Design, build, and maintain industrial ontologies, taxonomies, and knowledge models covering assets, spaces, processes, and operational data.
• Develop and extend models aligned with industry standards such as: Brick Schema, Project Haystack, ASHRAE 233, PIFC (Industry Foundation Classes), related building, utilities, energy, or asset-management ontologies.
• Define clear concept hierarchies, relationships, constraints, and naming conventions.
• Conduct ontology alignment and integration with external knowledge bases and domain-specific ontologies.
• Design semantic alignment strategies between heterogeneous data sources (BMS, IoT, SCADA, CMMS, ERP, digital twins).
• Ensure models support interoperability, extensibility, and backward compatibility.
• Leverage large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA, Mistral) and NLP pipelines to automate ontology population, entity extraction, and relation classification.
• Collaborate with data engineering and platform teams to: Operationalize ontologies in production systems, Support semantic querying, reasoning, and metadata-driven pipelines, Define best practices for ontology versioning, governance, and lifecycle management, Translate abstract semantic models into practical, implementable artifacts.
• Architecture Leadership & Strategy
• Define the long-term technical vision and roadmap for the enterprise semantic and knowledge graph platform.
• Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and reference architectures for semantic data integration across business units.
• Partner with data engineering, ML, product, and business teams to translate domain requirements into graph and semantic models.
• Evaluate and recommend emerging technologies, tools, and open standards in the knowledge graph and AI/LLM landscape.
• Represent the organization in external technical communities, standards bodies, and industry working groups.

Qualifications

• Core Expertise
• Deep, hands-on experience in ontology engineering and taxonomy design for industrial or building domains.
• Strong working knowledge of Brick Schema, Project Haystack, and IFC (not just theoretical familiarity).
• Proven experience building real-world, production-grade semantic models.
• Understanding of Large Language model along with structured knowledge of graphs for semantic backbone creation.
• Technical Skills
• Expert-level proficiency in OWL 2, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, SHACL, SKOS, JSON-LD, and Turtle.
• Semantic Web Stack: Deep expertise in at least two of: Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Stardog, GraphDB, Virtuoso, Ontotext, TigerGraph.
• Graph Databases: Familiarity with semantic querying (e.g., SPARQL, CIPHER) and metadata-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud data stacks (AWS, GCP, Azure), Apache Kafka, dbt, Databricks, or Snowflake.
• Data Platforms: Experience with OWL reasoners (Pellet, HermiT, FaCT++) and rule-based systems (SWRL, RIF).
• Reasoning Engines: Familiarity with knowledge graph platforms like Palantir Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, or Google Enterprise Knowledge Graph.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with software and data engineers.
• Understanding of how industrial systems generate, structure, and consume data.
• Experience with digital twins, asset modeling and systems engineering.
• Experience designing ontology governance frameworks on a scale.
• Ability to evaluate and integrate open vs proprietary semantic models.
• Prior experience in a platform, product, or enterprise-scale environment.
• Experience working in a fast-paced technology environment focused on delivering a world class product within an agile methodology utilizing latest technology frameworks.

About Us

Honeywell helps organizations solve the world's most complex challenges in automation, the future of aviation and energy transition. As a trusted partner, we provide actionable solutions and innovation through our Aerospace Technologies, Building Automation, Energy and Sustainability Solutions, and Industrial Automation business segments – powered by our Honeywell Forge software – that help make the world smarter, safer and more sustainable.