Remote Ontology Engineer for Educational Knowledge Graphs

HMH; United States; On-site; USD 100,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

HMH is seeking an Ontology Engineer to design and maintain semantics and knowledge graphs that power our K-12 education solutions. You will shape the ontology layer across systems, enabling better data discovery and interoperability for product teams.

Collaborate with data engineering, content development, and analytics to align knowledge representations with enterprise data models, publish clear documentation, and ensure scalable, production-ready implementations.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in philosophy, CS, information science, or equivalent.
• Proficiency in RDF/OWL/SHACL and SKOS.
• SQL and SPARQL or other graph query languages.
• Experience with graph databases/triplestores.
• Experience with ontology tools such as Stardog, Protégé, PoolParty.
• Experience with foundational ontologies (BFO, DOLCE, CC0/OBO Foundry).
• Experience integrating multiple disparate datasets into a common vocabulary and writing effective queries for production environments.
• Hands-on programming in Python/Java/R.
• Strong software engineering practices: Git, PRs, tests, CI/CD.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and adaptability.

Responsibilities

• Develops and maintains semantically rich ontologies for K-12 education domain and HMH products.
• Supports integration between ontology systems and data repositories; writes SPARQL against RDF/OWL; SHACL validation.
• Ensures accuracy of ontological structures through quality checks and updates.
• Collaborates with cross-functional teams to meet information needs with ontological solutions.
• Creates documentation for ontologies and knowledge graphs for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Coordinates with Data Engineering, Operations, and Content Development to align knowledge representation with enterprise data systems.

Skills

Ontology modeling

RDF/OWL/SHACL

SPARQL

Python

Git & CI/CD

Knowledge graphs

SQL

Gremlin/openCypher

Stardog/Protégé

Foundational ontologies (BFO/DOLCE/OBO

Education

Advanced degree

Tools

Protégé

Stardog

PoolParty

Semaphore

Job description

HMH is seeking an Ontology Engineer to design and maintain semantics and knowledge graphs that power our K-12 education solutions. You will shape the ontology layer across systems, enabling better data discovery and interoperability for product teams.

Collaborate with data engineering, content development, and analytics to align knowledge representations with enterprise data models, publish clear documentation, and ensure scalable, production-ready implementations.