Ontology Leader

GEP Worldwide; Clark (NJ); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and视觉—?

401(k) with a 3% company match

Paid time off and company holidays

Professional development opportunities

Job summary

GEP Worldwide is seeking a Senior Ontology Leader to own and evolve the procurement ontology end-to-end, leading ontologists and knowledge engineers across Consulting, Product, Engineering and AI. You will shape architecture, standards, and governance while staying hands-on to address complex modeling and AI use cases.

Ideal candidates bring 15+ years in knowledge engineering, expertise in RDF/OWL/SKOS/SHACL, and a proven track record guiding enterprise ontologies that scale across teams.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in knowledge engineering, semantic technology or information architecture.
• 8+ years building production ontologies or knowledge graphs.
• 5+ years leading teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Ontology and the team: vision, roadmap and modeling architecture for procurement ontology.
• Collaborate with Consulting, Product, Engineering and AI to drive adoption and governance.
• Solve AI and knowledge use cases with hands-on contributions to SPARQL, Cypher, SHACL and graph-based retrieval.
• Build the governance and maintenance framework including ownership, versioning and release cadence.

Skills

Knowledge engineering

Semantic technology

Information architecture

Leadership

Python

Pipelines

Education

Degree in Computer Science or Information Science

Tools

Protégé

TopBraid

PoolParty

GraphDB

Apache AGE

Oxigraph

Apache Jena

Job description

Who We Are

GEP, with over 30 offices internationally, is the fastest growing procurement and supply chain solutions firm – consulting, software and managed services. GEP has succeeded by being smart and creative; solving complex problems and finding opportunities for the world’s largest organizations.

Welcome to GEP

Who We Are

GEP, with over 30 offices internationally, is the fastest growing procurement and supply chain solutions firm – consulting, software and managed services. GEP has succeeded by being smart and creative; solving complex problems and finding opportunities for the world’s largest organizations.

How You Grow At GEP

We recognize people who make a genuine difference, work hard and drive achievements. Results are noticed and rewarded. It’s how you will grow a career at GEP, and in a much shorter time frame than at other firms.

Celebrating Everyone

GEP succeeds through the ideas and creativity of our team members so we embrace people of all experiences, nationalities, abilities, cultures, races, gender identities, sexual orientations and ages. What makes you unique and different is celebrated and will help GEP stand out even more. And we are a women‑foundated and ‑owned company so our foundation is making GEP a great place to work for women, a place where women can learn, advance and give back.

Are You One of Us

We're building GEP's Distributed Intelligent Data Layer, a semantic platform for procurement running on a custom technical stack. At its core is a GEP-owned procurement ontology: the shared model of products, categories, suppliers, contracts and spend that our AI products, agents and analytics are built on.

We're looking for a senior ontology leader to own that ontology end to end: lead the team of ontologists who build it, work across Consulting, Product, Engineering and AI to make it the shared foundation, and set the framework that keeps it governed as it scales. You'll stay hands‑on, modeling the hard parts, solving AI and knowledge use cases, and shaping the technical solution.

This is a hybrid role with 3 days on‑site in GEP’s Clark, NJ Headquarters. Level will be based on experience and scope of prior leadership.

Lead the ontology and the team

• Own the Ontology: Set the vision, roadmap and modeling architecture (RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL) for GEP's procurement ontology, and decide where it adopts, extends or diverges from UNSPSC, eClass and GS1.
• Lead the Ontologists: Hire, mentor and grow a team of ontologists and knowledge engineers; run design reviews, make the final call on hard modeling decisions, and oversee annotation guidelines and quality.

Collaborate across GEP

• Consulting and product owners: Turn consultants' procurement expertise into reusable ontology structures, and partner with product owners to prioritize ontology work against product roadmaps and drive adoption.
• Engineering, AI and leadership: Align with architects, data engineers and data scientists on how the ontology is consumed, and explain its value and trade‑offs to executives and clients.

Solve AI and knowledge use cases, hands‑on

• Deliver use cases: Lead and personally contribute to spend classification, entity resolution, semantic search, knowledge‑graph‑grounded retrieval (GraphRAG) for AI agents, and document knowledge extraction, across procurement and adjacent domains.
• Shape the technical solution: Guide decisions on SPARQL and Cypher query surfaces, OWL‑RL reasoning, SHACL validation, multi‑tenant design, and how the ontology grounds and evaluates LLM outputs.

Build the governance and maintenance framework

• Operating model: Define ownership, change control, versioning, release cadence, and how client extensions coexist with, or get promoted into, the core ontology.
• Quality and feedback: Automate testing (SHACL, competency questions, regression against real data) and set up a feedback loop from consultants, products and AI pipelines into prioritized changes.

What You Should Bring

• Experience: 15+ years in knowledge engineering, semantic technology or information architecture, including 8+ years building production ontologies or knowledge graphs and 5+ years leading teams. Degree in Computer Science, Information Science or related (advanced degree preferred).
• Ontology expertise: Expert in RDF, OWL 2, SKOS and SHACL, rule‑based inference (OWL‑RL / SWRL), SPARQL and Cypher, and tools such as Protégé, TopBraid or PoolParty, with a track record of governing an enterprise ontology that many teams depend on.
• AI and engineering: Hands‑on with knowledge graphs plus LLMs (GraphRAG, entity linking, LLM‑assisted extraction, vector search) and fluent enough in Python, pipelines and architecture to prototype and review designs.
• Domain: Grounding in procurement, source‑to‑pay, product catalog or master data, or an equally complex enterprise domain.
• Leadership and influence: A proven people leader who aligns Consulting, Product, Engineering and executives, translates between experts and business leaders, and balances rigor with pragmatism.

Nice To Have

• UNSPSC, eClass, GS1 or ETIM; consulting or professional services experience; ontology CI tooling (ROBOT, pySHACL); multi‑tenant ontology design; Oxigraph, Apache AGE, GraphDB or Apache Jena; W3C contributions or publications.

Salary Range: $190,000 – $220,000 annually, based on experience and qualifications.

Additional Compensation: Eligible for a performance‑based bonus tied to individual and company performance.

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) with a 3% company match, paid time off, company holidays, and professional development opportunities.