AI Knowledge Engineer: Ontologies, KG & RAG

IFS; Staines-upon-Thames; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is looking for engineers to build an ontology, knowledge graph and grounding infrastructure that enable AI agents to understand IFS software and reason over customer data.

You will design MCP servers over business objects, develop the write path for safe data changes by agents, and craft a semantic layer generated from the platform and domain experts. You will also implement retrieval/grounding, data provenance, and a routing/skills system to drive correct actions.

Qualifications

• Production experience building and operating enterprise systems with deep distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, API/schema design.
• Strong backend programming skills in a modern language and experience delivering AI systems built on LLMs and retrieval methods.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in knowledge graphs and semantic modelling: ontology design, schema evolution, embeddings, and grounding strategies.
• Experience with evaluation, benchmarking, prompt engineering, tracing and improving agents against evidence.
• Ability to integrate enterprise applications, business processes and data platforms with domain expert collaboration.
• Comfort translating tacit business knowledge into explicit, machine-usable models with domain experts.
• Depth in MCP tooling, tool surfaces, discoverability, governance and multi-tenancy isolation OR enterprise platform depth with metadata-driven systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) over business objects with forward/backward compatibility.
• Develop the write path enabling safe changes to customer operational data by agents.
• Create the semantic layer: ontology and knowledge graph generated from platform knowledge and domain experts.
• Build retrieval and grounding infrastructure: embeddings, vector databases, hybrid search, memory architectures.
• Establish data quality, provenance and versioning practices for the knowledge graph.
• Map user requests to correct operations with a routing layer and skill selection.
• Develop the control plane: authentication, entitlements, identity, telemetry, security.
• Create evaluation harness to certify agent behavior against the real product.
• Prototype and validate emerging tech, product opportunities and customer scenarios.
• Define engineering practices: testing, observability, governance and operational excellence.
• Contribute to technical design, review peers, and support domain onboarding.
• Represent work to customers and at events as needed.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architectures

API design

Security

CI/CD

Knowledge graphs

Ontology design

LLM / AI systems

RAG

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure

AWS

GCP

Job description

IFS is looking for engineers to build an ontology, knowledge graph and grounding infrastructure that enable AI agents to understand IFS software and reason over customer data.

You will design MCP servers over business objects, develop the write path for safe data changes by agents, and craft a semantic layer generated from the platform and domain experts. You will also implement retrieval/grounding, data provenance, and a routing/skills system to drive correct actions.