Principal Software Architect, Building Ontology

Honeywell; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Honeywell is seeking a Senior Ontologist in Atlanta, Georgia, to lead the design, development, and operationalization of ontologies for connected buildings. This strategic role involves working closely with domain experts and platform teams to ensure models meet industry standards and operational needs. The ideal candidate will have deep experience in ontology engineering and taxonomy design, strong knowledge of relevant standards, and familiarity with large language models. Join Honeywell in making the world smarter, safer, and more sustainable.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on experience in ontology engineering and taxonomy design for industrial or building domains.
• Strong working knowledge of Brick Schema, Project Haystack, and IFC.
• Expert-level proficiency in OWL 2, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, SHACL, SKOS, JSON-LD, and Turtle.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain industrial ontologies, taxonomies, and knowledge models.
• Conduct ontology alignment and integration with external knowledge bases.
• Define best practices for ontology versioning and lifecycle management.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Taxonomy design

Semantic technologies

Large Language models

Data interoperability

Collaboration with engineers

Tools

Neo4j

Amazon Neptune

Stardog

GraphDB

Virtuoso

Palantir Foundry

Job description

Overview

We are looking for a Senior Ontologist to lead the design, development, and operationalization of buildings ontologies and taxonomies that power data interoperability, analytics, and intelligent systems across connected buildings products.

This role is hands-on and strategic. You will work at the intersection of domain modeling, semantic technologies, and standards, shaping how complex data is represented, connected, and consumed at scale.

You will collaborate closely with domain experts, data engineers, platform architects, and product teams to ensure that semantic models are accurate, extensible, and aligned with industry standards and real-world operational needs.

Responsibilities

• Ontology & Semantic Model Development: Design, build, and maintain industrial ontologies, taxonomies, and knowledge models covering assets, spaces, processes, and operational data.
• Develop and extend models aligned with industry standards such as Brick Schema, Project Haystack, ASHRAE 233P, IFC (Industry Foundation Classes), and related building, utilities, energy, or asset-management ontologies.
• Define clear concept hierarchies, relationships, constraints, and naming conventions.
• Conduct ontology alignment and integration with external knowledge bases and domain-specific ontologies.

• Standards & Interoperability: Map, align, and reconcile concepts across multiple industry schemas and customer-specific models.
• Design semantic alignment strategies between heterogeneous data sources (BMS, IoT, SCADA, CMMS, ERP, digital twins).
• Ensure models support interoperability, extensibility, and backward compatibility.
• Leverage large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA, Mistral) and NLP pipelines to automate ontology population, entity extraction, and relation classification.

• Applied Semantics & Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with data engineering and platform teams to:
• Operationalize ontologies in production systems
• Support semantic querying, reasoning, and metadata-driven pipelines
• Define best practices for ontology versioning, governance, and lifecycle management.
• Translate abstract semantic models into practical, implementable artifacts.

• Architecture Leadership & Strategy: Define the long-term technical vision and roadmap for the enterprise semantic and knowledge graph platform.
• Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and reference architectures for semantic data integration across business units.
• Partner with data engineering, ML, product, and business teams to translate domain requirements into graph and semantic models.
• Evaluate and recommend emerging technologies, tools, and open standards in the knowledge graph and AI/LLM landscape.

Represent the organization in external technical communities, standards bodies, and industry working groups.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

Core Expertise

• Deep, hands-on experience in ontology engineering and taxonomy design for industrial or building domains.
• Strong working knowledge of Brick Schema, Project Haystack, and IFC (not just theoretical familiarity).
• Proven experience building real-world, production-grade semantic models.
• Understanding of Large Language models along with structured knowledge of graphs for semantic backbone creation.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level proficiency in OWL 2, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, SHACL, SKOS, JSON-LD, and Turtle. Semantic Web Stack.
• Deep expertise in at least two of: Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Stardog, GraphDB, Virtuoso, Ontotext, TigerGraph.
• Familiarity with semantic querying (e.g., SPARQL, CIPHER) and metadata-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud data stacks (AWS, GCP, Azure), Apache Kafka, dbt, Databricks, or Snowflake. Data Platforms.
• Experience with OWL reasoners (Pier Pellet, HermiT, FaCT++) and rule-based systems (SWRL, RIF).
• Familiarity with knowledge graph platforms like Palantir Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, or Google Enterprise Knowledge Graph.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with software and data engineers.
• Understanding of how industrial systems generate, structure, and consume data.
• Experience with digital twins, asset modeling and systems engineering.
• Experience designing ontology governance frameworks at scale.
• Ability to evaluate and integrate open vs proprietary semantic models.
• Prior experience in a platform, product, or enterprise-scale environment.
• Experience working in a fast-paced technology environment focused on delivering a world-class product within an agile methodology utilizing latest technology frameworks.

About Us: Honeywell helps organizations solve the world's most complex challenges in automation, the future of aviation and energy transition. As a trusted partner, we provide actionable solutions and innovation through our Aerospace Technologies, Building Automation, Energy and Sustainability Solutions, and Industrial Automation business segments – powered by our Honeywell Forge software – that help make the world smarter, safer and more sustainable.