Product Ontology Designer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus eligibility

Medical/dental/vision coverage

401(k) with company match

Paid time off and holidays

Professional development opportunities

Job summary

GEP Worldwide is building a Distributed Intelligent Data Layer for procurement. You will define the product ontology that models products, categories, suppliers and spend; translate procurement knowledge into formal RDF/OWL models and ensure governance as the ontology scales across tenants.

Collaborate with domain SMEs and engineers in a hybrid team to validate against real catalog and spend data using SPARQL and Cypher, while aligning to UNSPSC, eClass and GS1 standards.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building ontologies, taxonomies or knowledge models in production.
• Proficient in RDF, OWL and SKOS for modeling.
• Experience with SHACL constraints and inference rules (OWL-RL / SWRL).
• Proficient in SPARQL; Cypher/openCypher experience is a plus.
• Domain grounding in procurement, product catalog or spend classification.

Responsibilities

• Design the product/procurement ontology including classes, relationships and taxonomies using RDF, OWL and SKOS.
• Author validation and inference rules to enable correct data and future inference.
• Align ontology to procurement standards (UNSPSC, eClass, GS1).
• Ground the model in real data with domain SMEs and data engineers.
• Establish governance: versioning, naming conventions and docs.
• Create data-cleaning and annotation guidelines for mapping records.

Skills

Ontology modeling

Taxonomy modeling

RDF/OWL/SKOS

SHACL

Reasoning rules

SPARQL

Cypher/openCypher

Procurement domain knowledge

Collaboration in hybrid agile teams

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information/Library Science, Linguistics, or related field

Tools

Oxigraph

Apache AGE

GraphDB

Apache Jena

Triple stores

Job description

GEP is a global leader in procurement and supply chain transformation. We help enterprises harness the power of AI and digital technology to stay ahead in the new economy. Through AI-driven solutions, we enable businesses to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, gain a competitive advantage, and maximize business and shareholder value.

We partner with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises across industries to build high-performing, resilient and sustainable supply chains.

We’re always looking for talented people who can help us grow, continually improve and make a difference. At GEP, we’re building a beautiful company, enjoying the journey and creating lasting impact for our clients, 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.
• Ontology and taxonomy modeling skills: RDF, OWL and SKOS.
• Constraints and reasoning skills: SHACL, and familiarity with rule-based inference (OWL-RL / SWRL).
• 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.