Director, Ontology & Knowledge Products

Harnham; United States; On-site; USD 265,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401(k)

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Harnham is seeking a Director-level leader to own the enterprise ontology and semantic product portfolio, shaping the strategy, standards, and roadmaps for AI-enabled data and knowledge products. You will partner with governance, architecture, engineering, and business stakeholders to design and scale reusable semantic capabilities across the organization.

The role requires deep technical hands-on expertise in ontology design, semantic modeling, and knowledge graphs, with proven leadership in

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading ontology, semantic layer, knowledge graph, metadata, or enterprise information architecture work in a complex organization.
• Deep understanding of semantic modeling, entity/relationship design, taxonomy, metadata, data definitions, and knowledge graph enablement.
• Experience translating AI use cases into ontology and semantic product requirements.
• Experience building reusable enterprise data or knowledge capabilities rather than isolated solutions.
• Strong product ownership experience across roadmaps, prioritization, lifecycle management, and stakeholder alignment.
• Ability to remain deeply technical and hands-on while operating at a Director level.
• Experience working across complex, highly matrixed organizations.

Responsibilities

• Own ontology products from discovery and design through implementation, validation, adoption, monitoring, and refinement.
• Establish change management, versioning, documentation, governance, and support processes.
• Align data product roadmaps with ontology priorities to ensure enterprise data is reliable, semantically consistent, and AI-ready.
• Resolve cross-domain definition, quality, prioritization, and ownership issues.
• Partner with Data Governance, Data Architecture, Data Engineering, AI Product, AI Engineering, Security, Privacy, and business and clinical stakeholders.
• Align ontology standards, data definitions, metadata, stewardship, and data quality practices.
• Serve as the primary ontology leader for AI use-case teams.
• Communicate ontology priorities, design decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and progress to senior leadership.
• Help establish and scale the long-term ontology and knowledge products function.

Skills

Ontology design

Semantic modeling

Knowledge graphs

Metadata management

Enterprise data architecture

Product ownership

Leadership

Stakeholder alignment

Hands-on technically

Matrixed organizations

Tools

Palantir Foundry

Job description

Location: Fully Remote, with occasional travel to Dallas, TX

Restricted States: Candidates cannot work from California, New York, Hawaii, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, or Wyoming

Work Authorization: U.S. Citizens and Green Card holders only

Base Salary: Target of approximately $265,000, with a maximum of $300,000

Bonus: 20% annual bonus

Benefits: Healthcare, 401(k), and comprehensive benefits

The Opportunity

We are partnering with a large, complex healthcare organization making a significant investment in AI, agentic AI, and consumer-facing digital experiences.

The Director of Ontology & Knowledge Products will build the enterprise ontology and semantic products required to support AI use cases, analytics, operational workflows, and knowledge-enabled digital experiences.

This is a greenfield opportunity. The ontology function does not exist today, and this leader will help design the capability, operating model, roadmap, and team from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Own the enterprise ontology portfolio and semantic product strategy across priority AI use cases.
• Translate business, clinical, operational, analytics, and AI needs into an ontology roadmap, backlog, and delivery plan.
• Lead ontology design across enterprise domains, including entities, relationships, attributes, definitions, business rules, and cross-domain mappings.
• Define semantic modeling standards supporting AI reasoning, retrieval, analytics, and knowledge graphs.
• Build reusable ontology capabilities that extend across multiple enterprise use cases.

Ontology Lifecycle & Data Products

• Own ontology products from discovery and design through implementation, validation, adoption, monitoring, and refinement.
• Establish change management, versioning, documentation, governance, and support processes.
• Align data product roadmaps with ontology priorities to ensure enterprise data is reliable, semantically consistent, and AI-ready.
• Resolve cross-domain definition, quality, prioritization, and ownership issues.

Governance & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Partner with Data Governance, Data Architecture, Data Engineering, AI Product, AI Engineering, Security, Privacy, and business and clinical stakeholders.
• Align ontology standards, data definitions, metadata, stewardship, and data quality practices.
• Serve as the primary ontology leader for AI use-case teams.
• Communicate ontology priorities, design decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and progress to senior leadership.
• Help establish and scale the long-term ontology and knowledge products function.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience leading ontology, semantic layer, knowledge graph, metadata, or enterprise information architecture work in a complex organization.
• Deep understanding of semantic modeling, entity/relationship design, taxonomy, metadata, data definitions, and knowledge graph enablement.
• Experience translating AI use cases into ontology and semantic product requirements.
• Experience building reusable enterprise data or knowledge capabilities rather than isolated solutions.
• Strong product ownership experience across roadmaps, prioritization, lifecycle management, and stakeholder alignment.
• Ability to remain deeply technical and hands-on while operating at a Director level.
• Experience working across complex, highly matrixed organizations.

Experience

• 14-18 years of overall experience across data, ontology, semantic modeling, enterprise information architecture, knowledge management, data products, governance, or related areas.
• 8-12 years involving ontology, semantic layers, taxonomy, metadata, knowledge graphs, enterprise data, or information architecture.
• 5-8+ years of leadership experience across teams, major programs, product portfolios, or enterprise data/knowledge initiatives.
• Experience designing, operating, or scaling ontology, semantic models, knowledge graphs, metadata, or data product capabilities.
• Healthcare, life sciences, financial services, or another complex regulated-industry background is strongly preferred.

Technical Expertise

• Ontology design and semantic modeling
• Enterprise taxonomy and metadata management
• Entity/relationship modeling and knowledge architecture
• Knowledge graphs and graph databases
• Semantic layers and retrieval patterns
• Data catalogs and modern enterprise data platforms
• AI-ready data, retrieval augmentation, embeddings/vectorization, and governed context management
• Privacy, security, compliance, and responsible AI

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building an enterprise ontology, semantic layer, knowledge graph, or knowledge product capability from scratch.
• Experience supporting AI, GenAI, conversational AI, search, personalization, decision-support, or workflow automation.
• Experience with healthcare data domains such as patients, providers, scheduling, encounters, medications, claims, billing, or clinical documentation.
• Experience with graph/semantic technologies, data catalogs, metadata management, MDM, or AI knowledge/retrieval systems.
• Experience with Palantir Foundry or similar ontology-driven enterprise platforms is highly valuable