Principal Ontology Architect for Knowledge Graphs

Samba; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba in Amsterdam seeks an experienced Ontology Engineer to own the design, governance, and evolution of Samba's semantic data models as the domain authority for its knowledge graph. This hands-on role includes ontology design, SHACL validation, and building production pipelines with data engineering peers.

You will lead ontology reviews with cross-functional teams, drive trade-offs between expressivity and performance, and mentor junior engineers and scientists while applying AI and

Qualifications

• 5+ years in ontology engineering or knowledge graph development.
• Proven production ontologies at scale.
• Strong W3C standards expertise (RDF/RDFS/OWL).
• Experience with graph databases and SPARQL.
• Ability to defend modeling decisions in design reviews.

Responsibilities

• Own Core Ontologies: design and versioning of core ontologies in RDF/RDFS/OWL and set standards.
• Validate and Define Schemas: author SHACL shapes for post-load validation and derived attributes.
• Define Derivation Logic: establish scoring logic for viewership events and graph attributes.
• Build Graph Pipelines: production-quality pipelines in Python and SPARQL; entity resolution and record linkage.
• Enrich and Apply AI: integrate third-party data; apply embeddings and LLM approaches for ontology mapping.
• Lead Design Reviews: articulate trade-offs among expressivity, scalability, and query performance.
• Mentor and Teach: mentor Ontology Engineers and data scientists; lead internal talks on knowledge graphs.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Semantic data modeling

Knowledge graph development

Explain trade-offs to non-specialists

Python data pipelines

Entity resolution / deduplication

SHACL design patterns

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or related field

Tools

SPARQL

Python

SHACL

RDF/RDFS/OWL

Amazon Neptune

Stardog

GraphDB

Jena

PySpark

Databricks

Job description

Samba in Amsterdam seeks an experienced Ontology Engineer to own the design, governance, and evolution of Samba's semantic data models as the domain authority for its knowledge graph. This hands-on role includes ontology design, SHACL validation, and building production pipelines with data engineering peers.

You will lead ontology reviews with cross-functional teams, drive trade-offs between expressivity and performance, and mentor junior engineers and scientists while applying AI and