Principal Data Scientist — Knowledge Graphs & AI Research

SAP IT Business Systeme; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 198,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement

Mentorship programs

Research publications encouraged

Job summary

SAP Research & Innovation North America in Palo Alto seeks a Principal Data Scientist for Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs to lead research and work with product teams to ship results. You will define bets, advance learning on business data, and mentor scientists.

You will combine graph-based modeling with semantic data integration across SAP metadata and master data, building scalable knowledge graphs and AI-enabled workflows.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in applied research, data science or a PhD with 5+ years of leadership in research that changed a product or platform.
• MS or PhD in computer science, machine learning, statistics, mathematics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep expertise in knowledge graphs, ontologies or semantic data integration: RDF/OWL/SHACL, SPARQL, or graph schemas, entity resolution, semantic layers.
• Strong foundations in machine learning and statistics; fluent in Python and SQL, with PyTorch or JAX; comfortable working with large schemas.
• Strong problem solving and communication skills, able to explain trade-offs to executives and mentor scientists.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead our research toward learning and applying knowledge graphs and ontologies to SAP data.
• Collaborate with product teams to ship results and demonstrate impact in SAP Knowledge Graph, Joule and related platforms.
• Publish at top venues, release benchmarks, and mentor scientists and PhD interns.
• Work with data teams and domain experts in co-innovation projects to turn enterprise data problems into tractable ontology problems.
• Travel up to 10% as needed and represent SAP externally.

Skills

Knowledge graphs

Ontologies

Semantic data integration

Graph ML

LLM on data

Benchmark design

Python

PyTorch

SQL

SPARQL

Education

MS/PhD in CS or ML or statistics

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

SQL

SPARQL

Python

Job description

SAP Research & Innovation North America in Palo Alto seeks a Principal Data Scientist for Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs to lead research and work with product teams to ship results. You will define bets, advance learning on business data, and mentor scientists.

You will combine graph-based modeling with semantic data integration across SAP metadata and master data, building scalable knowledge graphs and AI-enabled workflows.