Director of Semantic Systems & Knowledge Graphs

Novartis; East Hanover (NJ); On-site; USD 195,000 - 361,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k) with company match

Paid time off

Job summary

Novartis is seeking a Director, Semantic and Knowledge Engineering to lead the design, implementation, and governance of enterprise semantic models, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and metadata frameworks powering NovaOS.

This role partners across Applied AI, Data Science, Product, and Engineering to establish trusted semantic assets that enable interoperable data, AI reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and scalable enterprise intelligence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in CS, Information Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Bioinformatics, or related discipline.
• 8+ years of experience in semantic technologies, knowledge engineering, metadata management, or enterprise information architecture.
• Hands-on expertise with ontologies, RDF/OWL, knowledge graphs, graph databases, metadata management, and semantic web technologies.
• Experience implementing semantic solutions that enable AI, analytics, interoperability, and enterprise search.
• Strong leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills with experience leading cross‑functional technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of enterprise ontologies, taxonomies, business vocabularies, and semantic models.
• Develop and maintain knowledge graphs and semantic services that support AI, analytics, search, and business applications.
• Partner with AI, Data Science, Product, and Engineering teams to integrate semantic capabilities into NovaOS products and platforms.
• Establish metadata standards, semantic governance processes, and quality controls for enterprise knowledge assets.
• Support AI initiatives by developing semantic foundations for RAG, agentic AI, reasoning engines, and contextual search.
• Evaluate emerging semantic technologies and recommend improvements to the enterprise knowledge architecture.
• Lead and mentor semantic and knowledge engineers while promoting reusable engineering patterns and technical excellence.

Skills

Ontologies

RDF/OWL

Knowledge graphs

Metadata management

Semantic web

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Education

Bachelor’s or higher in CS/IS/AI/Data Science/Bioinformatics

Tools

Graph databases

Job description

Novartis is seeking a Director, Semantic and Knowledge Engineering to lead the design, implementation, and governance of enterprise semantic models, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and metadata frameworks powering NovaOS.

This role partners across Applied AI, Data Science, Product, and Engineering to establish trusted semantic assets that enable interoperable data, AI reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and scalable enterprise intelligence.