Ontology Leader

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with 3% match

Paid time off

Professional development

Job summary

GEP in Clark, NJ is seeking a Senior Ontology Leader to own the ontology end-to-end, lead the team of ontologists and align with Consulting, Product, Engineering and AI to drive shared foundations and adoption.

You will model hard parts, solve AI and knowledge use cases, and shape technical solutions while building governance for scalable enterprise ontologies. Hybrid role; 3 days on-site in Clark, NJ.

Qualifications

• 15+ years in knowledge engineering, semantic tech or information architecture.
• 8+ years building production ontologies or knowledge graphs.
• 5+ years leading teams and driving cross-functional collaboration.
• Degree in CS, information science or related field.

Responsibilities

• Own the ontology vision, roadmap and modeling for procurement ontology.
• Lead ontologists; review design decisions and guidelines.
• Partner with Consulting, Product and Engineering to drive adoption.
• Guide AI integration, SPARQL/Cypher surfaces and SHACL validation.

Skills

Knowledge engineering

Semantic technology

Information architecture

Team leadership

Python

Graph databases

Education

CS/Info Science degree

Tools

Protégé

TopBraid

PoolParty

Job description

GEP Clark, Clark, New Jersey, United States

Full Time

Job Description

Welcome to GEP

Who We Are

GEP, with over 30 offices internationally, is the fastestgrowing procurement and supply chain solutions firm – consulting, software andmanaged services. GEP has succeeded by being smart and creative; solvingcomplex problems and finding opportunities for the world’s largestorganizations.

How You Grow at GEP

We recognize people who make a genuine difference, workhard and drive achievements. Results are noticed and rewarded. It’s how youwill grow a career at GEP, and in a much shorter time frame than at otherfirms.

Celebrating Everyone

GEP succeeds through the ideas and creativity of our teammembers so we embrace people of all experiences, nationalities, abilities,cultures, races, gender identities, sexual orientations and ages. What makesyou unique and different is celebrated and will help GEP stand out even more.And we are a women-founded and -owned company so our foundation is making GEP agreat place to work for women, a place where women can learn, advance and giveback.

Are You One of Us

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

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

This is a hybrid role with3 days on-site in GEP’s Clark, NJ Headquarters. Level will be based onexperience and scope of prior leadership.

Lead theontology and the team

• Own the Ontology: Setthe vision, roadmap and modeling architecture (RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL) forGEP's procurement ontology, and decide where it adopts, extends ordiverges from UNSPSC, eClass and GS1.
• Lead the Ontologists: Hire,mentor and grow a team of ontologists and knowledge engineers; run designreviews, make the final call on hard modeling decisions, and overseeannotation guidelines and quality.
• Consulting and productowners: Turn consultants' procurement expertise into reusable ontologystructures, and partner with product owners to prioritize ontology workagainst product roadmaps and drive adoption.
• Engineering, AI andleadership: Align with architects, data engineers and data scientistson how the ontology is consumed, and explain its value and trade-offs toexecutives and clients.

Solve AIand knowledge use cases, hands-on

• Deliver use cases: Leadand personally contribute to spend classification, entity resolution,semantic search, knowledge-graph-grounded retrieval (GraphRAG) for AIagents, and document knowledge extraction, across procurement and adjacentdomains.
• Shape the technicalsolution: Guide decisions on SPARQL and Cypher query surfaces, OWL-RLreasoning, SHACL validation, multi-tenant design, and how the ontologygrounds and evaluates LLM outputs.

Build thegovernance and maintenance framework

• Operating model: Defineownership, change control, versioning, release cadence, and how clientextensions coexist with, or get promoted into, the core ontology.
• Quality and feedback: Automatetesting (SHACL, competency questions, regression against real data) andset up a feedback loop from consultants, products and AI pipelines intoprioritized changes.

What YouShould Bring

• Experience: 15+ yearsin knowledge engineering, semantic technology or information architecture,including 8+ years building production ontologies or knowledge graphs and5+ years leading teams. Degree in Computer Science, Information Science orrelated (advanced degree preferred).
• Ontology expertise: Expertin RDF, OWL 2, SKOS and SHACL, rule-based inference (OWL-RL / SWRL),SPARQL and Cypher, and tools such as Protégé, TopBraid or PoolParty, witha track record of governing an enterprise ontology that many teams dependon.
• AI and engineering: Hands-onwith knowledge graphs plus LLMs (GraphRAG, entity linking, LLM-assistedextraction, vector search) and fluent enough in Python, pipelines andarchitecture to prototype and review designs.
• Domain: Grounding inprocurement, source-to-pay, product catalog or master data, or an equallycomplex enterprise domain.
• Leadership and influence: Aproven people leader who aligns Consulting, Product, Engineering andexecutives, translates between experts and business leaders, and balancesrigor with pragmatism.

Nice tohave:

• 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.

GEP’s strength is its people. As a leader in procurement and supply chain solutions, we are committed to providing innovative solutions that create a competitive advantage for enterprises worldwide. Our leadership helps us maintain this focus and drives our commitment to deliver the highest value to our clients.

GEP’s leadership is a collective of some of the most experienced and accomplished professionals in the industry. Blending together strong business acumen with rich technical expertise, they are leading GEP’s global workforce into the future

WeAreGEP

What makes us really stand out from the crowd?

We value and invest in talent. We respect honesty and individuality. We put our clients and our people first. This is what makes us special, and why GEP is an exceptional place to work.