Product Ontology Design Engineer

GEP; Clark (NJ); Hybrid; USD 125,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

3 days on-site in Clark, NJ

Professional development opportunities

401(k) with company match

Job summary

GEP is seeking a Product Ontology Designer in Clark, NJ to define the procurement ontology in RDF/OWL, aligning with industry standards and governing ontology across tenants. You will validate models with SPARQL and Cypher, collaborating with domain SMEs and engineers in a hybrid agile setting.

Responsibilities include establishing governance, annotator guidelines, and researching data-grounding with real catalog and spend data to ensure accuracy and scalability.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building ontologies, taxonomies or knowledge models in production.
• Experience with product catalog, master data or spend data modeling.
• Experience translating domain knowledge into formal ontologies.

Responsibilities

• Design the product/procurement ontology with RDF, OWL and SKOS.
• Define SHACL constraints and reasoning rules for inference.
• Map to standards (UNSPSC, GS1, eClass) and align with client schemes.
• Validate ontology against real catalog data and query patterns (SPARQL, Cypher).
• Establish governance: versioning, naming conventions and docs.
• Create data-cleaning and annotation guidelines for mappings.

Skills

Ontology modeling

RDF/OWL/SKOS

SHACL constraints

SPARQL/Cypher

Domain procurement knowledge

Hybrid agile collaboration

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field

Advanced degree a plus

Tools

Protégé

TopBraid

PoolParty

SPARQL

openCypher

Job description

GEP Clark, Clark, New Jersey, United States

Full Time

Job Description

Overview

GEP is a global leader in procurement and supply chaintransformation. We help enterprises harness the power of AI and digitaltechnology to stay ahead in the new economy. Through AI-driven solutions, weenable businesses to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, gain acompetitive advantage, and maximize business and shareholder value.

We partner with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprisesacross industries to build high-performing, resilient and sustainable supplychains.

We’re always looking for talented people who can help usgrow, continually improve and make a difference. At GEP, we’re building abeautiful company, enjoying the journey and creating lasting impact for ourclients, our communities and one another.

What You Will Do

We’re building GEP's Distributed Intelligent Data Layer, a semantic platform for procurement running on custom technical stack.

We're looking for a Product Ontology Designer who will define the product and procurement ontology that everything else is built on: the classes, relationships, taxonomies and rules that model products, categories, suppliers and spend.

You’ll translate procurement domain knowledge into rigorous RDF/OWL models, validate them against both query surfaces (SPARQL and Cypher), align them to industry standards, and set the governance that keeps the ontology consistent as it scales across tenants.

• Design the product/procurement ontology: Model classes, properties, relationships and taxonomies for products, categories, suppliers and spend using RDF, OWL and SKOS.
• Author validation & inference rules: Define SHACL constraints and reasoning rules that keep data correct and enable inference (later materialized via OWL-RL).
• Align to standards: Map and reconcile against procurement standards and client schemes (UNSPSC, eClass, GS1), resolving overlaps and gaps.
• Ground the model in real data: Partner with domain SMEs and data engineers to validate the ontology against real catalog and spend data and query patterns, on both SPARQL and Cypher.
• Own governance: Establish versioning, change control, naming conventions and documentation so the ontology stays coherent as it grows.
• Enable the annotators: Write and maintain the data-cleaning and annotation guidelines that annotators apply when mapping records and relationships to the ontology, and adjudicate the hard classification cases.

What You Should Bring

• Education: Degree in Computer Science, Information/Library Science, Linguistics, or a related field (advanced degree a plus).
• Experience: 3+ years building ontologies, taxonomies or knowledge models in production, ideally over product, catalog or master data. Equivalent domains are welcome; we care about the modeling skill.
• Core technical skills:
  • Ontology and taxonomy modeling: RDF, OWL and SKOS.
  • Constraints and reasoning: SHACL, and familiarity with rule-based inference (OWL-RL /SWRL).
  • Ontology tooling: Protégé, TopBraid, PoolParty or comparable.
  • SPARQL (and ideally Cypher/openCypher) for validating and querying models against real data.
  • Domain grounding in procurement, product catalog, spend classification or master data, or the ability to ramp on it quickly.
• Mindset: Rigor, conceptual clarity, and a drive to build a model that stays clean under real-world messiness.
• Collaboration: Strong communication skills and comfort translating between domain SMEs and engineers in a hybrid, agile team.

Nice to have (any of these makes you stand out):

• Procurement / product standards: UNSPSC, eClass, GS1.
• Entity resolution and data-quality practices.
• Working with Oxigraph, Apache AGE, or comparable triple stores (Apache Jena, GraphDB) directly.
• Defining data-cleaning / annotation guidelines and working with data curators.

This is a hybrid role with 3 days on-site in GEP's Clark, NJ Headquarters.

Salary Range:

$125,000 - $170,000 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.