Lead Ontologist, Knowledge Graph & Identity

Samba; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is seeking a Senior Ontologist for the Knowledge Graph & Identity team in New York. You will own ontology design, governance, and scalable graph models across data domains.

You will write SPARQL, SHACL, and RDF/OWL schemas, lead reviews with cross‑functional partners, and mentor junior engineers to advance semantic modeling and graph best practices.

Experience with embedding models and Databricks/Spark integration is a plus for production workflows.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of hands-on experience in ontology engineering, semantic data modeling, or knowledge graph development.
• Deep expertise in W3C standards: RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL 1.1, and SHACL.
• Strong Python—production‑quality, data pipelines and graph processing.
• Experience with entity resolution, record linkage, or deduplication at scale.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Information Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or related field; Master's/PhD preferred.
• Strong communicator able to defend ontological modeling decisions in design reviews.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and govern Samba's core ontologies in RDF/RDFS/OWL at scale.
• Author SHACL shapes for graph validation and data quality.
• Define derived-attribute schemas like genre affinity and viewing summaries.
• Lead ontology design reviews with stakeholders.
• Build production-quality knowledge graph pipelines in Python and SPARQL.
• Develop entity resolution and record linkage pipelines.
• Collaborate with data engineering to deploy in Databricks/Spark pipelines.
• Mentor Ontology Engineers and data scientists on semantic modeling.
• Lead internal talks on ontology and semantic web topics.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Semantic data modeling

Python programming

Entity resolution

Description logics

Communication

Data governance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's or PhD preferred

Tools

SPARQL

SHACL

RDF/OWL

Amazon Neptune

Stardog

PySpark

Databricks

Job description

Samba is seeking a Senior Ontologist for the Knowledge Graph & Identity team in New York. You will own ontology design, governance, and scalable graph models across data domains.

You will write SPARQL, SHACL, and RDF/OWL schemas, lead reviews with cross‑functional partners, and mentor junior engineers to advance semantic modeling and graph best practices.

Experience with embedding models and Databricks/Spark integration is a plus for production workflows.