Retail Domain Ontologist

Altimetrik; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Altimetrik is seeking a Senior Retail Domain Ontologist to own the design, governance, and refinement of formal ontologies across retail product, merchandising, inventory, supply chain, fulfillment, and digital commerce. In this individual-contributor role, you will translate business requirements into ontology-backed data contracts and bridge business stakeholders with IT delivery teams.

You will define class hierarchies, relationships, and data-quality rules, work with SPARQL and OWL 2 tools,

Qualifications

• 7+ years in ontology engineering or semantic data architecture.
• 3+ years in retail, consumer goods, or supply chain.
• Experience with OWL 2, RDFS, SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL.
• Experience with Protégé or TopBraid.
• Bachelor's degree in CS/Info Sci/Library Sci/Linguistics.

Responsibilities

• Design, author, and govern ontologies across retail domains.
• Translate business requirements into ontology concepts and data contracts.
• Use SPARQL and knowledge graphs to validate models.
• Integrate AI/LLM tooling into SDLC.
• Collaborate with IT, Data Governance, Merchandising, Supply Chain, and QA.
• Lead governance and communicate concepts to stakeholders.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Knowledge representation

Semantic data architecture

Retail domain knowledge

SPARQL

Protégé

TopBraid

Knowledge graphs

Agile delivery

Requirement analysis

Jira & Confluence

AI/LLM tooling integration

Data contracts

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Information Science / Library Science / Linguistics

Tools

Protégé

TopBraid

Stardog

Amazon Neptune

GraphDB

Job description

We are seeking a Retail Domain Ontologist to own the design, refinement, and governance of formal ontologies across retail product, merchandising, inventory, supply chain, fulfillment, and digital commerce.

In this senior individual-contributor role, you will bridge business stakeholders and IT delivery teams, translating business requirements and user stories into ontology-backed data contracts. You will also help integrate ontology-aware AI/LLM tooling into the software development lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, author, and govern domain ontologies using OWL 2, RDFS, SKOS, and SHACL.
• Develop semantic models across retail product, merchandising, inventory, supply chain, fulfillment, and digital commerce.
• Define class hierarchies, relationships, axioms, constraints, and data-quality rules.
• Partner with Product Management to translate business requirements into formal ontology concepts and data contracts.
• Establish traceability from requirements → ontology → code → test.
• Use SPARQL, semantic reasoning, and knowledge graph platforms to query and validate semantic models.
• Integrate AI/LLM tools, RAG, and ontology-aware context into software development workflows.
• Collaborate across IT, Data Governance, Merchandising, Supply Chain, Digital Commerce, and QA.
• Lead ontology refinement and governance while communicating technical concepts to business and executive stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in ontology engineering, knowledge representation, or semantic data architecture.
• 3+ years of experience within retail, consumer goods, or supply chain.
• Hands-on experience with OWL 2, RDFS, SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL, and ontology development tools such as Protégé or TopBraid.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and semantic reasoning.
• Strong understanding of retail product, merchandising, supply chain, fulfillment, and/or digital commerce data.
• Experience with requirement analysis, traceability, and Agile delivery using Jira and Confluence.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/LLM tooling into software development workflows, including code generation, semantic search, or RAG.
• Experience partnering with Product Management and translating user stories into formal data contracts.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Library Science, Linguistics, or a related field.

Preferred

• Master's or PhD in Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, or Ontological Engineering.
• Experience with GS1 standards and retail data exchange.
• Experience with graph-RAG, knowledge graph embeddings, or LLM fine-tuning.
• Experience with knowledge graph platforms such as Stardog, Amazon Neptune, or GraphDB.