Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards (Contract)

Altos Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 145,000 - 169,000; Part time

Job summary

Altos Labs in Redwood City, CA seeks a Senior Knowledge Engineer to govern and advance ontology and data-standards, spanning LinkML/Biolink models and curation pipelines.

You will translate bench and computational models into rigorous ontologies, build scalable agentic workflows, and ensure provenance and quality across biological metadata. This is a contract role with leadership in data representation.

Qualifications

• PhD with 5+ years in bioinformatics or related life sciences.
• MS with 8+ years in bioinformatics or computational biology.
• Strong knowledge of ontology standards and tools.

Responsibilities

• Knowledge Modeling & Ontology Engineering: design and extend internal LinkML/Biolink models and ontologies.
• Agentic & Automated Curation: scale data profiling, validation, and entity mapping using MCP and LLM workflows.
• Biological Data Harmonization: map diverse experimental modalities to canonical schema.
• Quality, Evaluation & Provenance: automated validation and provenance tracking.

Skills

Ontology Engineering

Knowledge Graph

LinkML

Biolink Ontologies

Semantic Web

Python

AI Tooling

Version Control

Data Provenance

Education

PhD with 5+ years

MS with 8+ years

Tools

Protégé

ROBOT

ODK

SSSOM

Cursor

Job description

Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards (Contract)

Our Mission

Our mission is to restore cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.

Diversity at Altos

Altos Labs has been named one of the Top 3 Biotech Companies and ranked for the second year on the Forbes 2026 Best Startups in America list. At Altos, exceptional scientists and industry leaders from around the world work together to advance a shared mission. Our intentional focus is on Belonging, so that all employees know that they are valued for their unique perspectives. We are all accountable for sustaining a diverse and inclusive environment.

What You Will Contribute To Altos

• As a contract Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards, you will drive how our team represents biological knowledge At Altos
• We have built the machinery: a large canonical LinkML/Biolink schema including REST/MCP/CLI service layer; specification packages covering multiple prior-knowledge sources; and an agentic / human-in-the-loop curation framework. What it lacks is a technical owner—someone to govern and administer the content.
• You are the scientific translation layer between biological discovery and AI platform engineering. You will elicit implicit models from bench and computational scientists, encode them rigorously, and utilize the agentic workflows that scale curation beyond what manual review can reach.
• This role carries explicit decision rights: review authority on canonical schema change, ownership of the curation conventions that data atlas and engineering teams follow.

Key Responsibilities

• Knowledge Modeling & Ontology Engineering:
  • Design, maintain, and extend internal LinkML / Biolink models and ontologies covering experimental and prior-knowledge metadata—driven by competency questions from user requirements and not by source-side convenience.
  • Own mapping and alignment as a discipline: cross-ontology mappings with recorded justification and provenance, and upstream term requests as appropriate.
  • Serve as reviewer of record for schema change, holding the line that reuse precedes coining anything new.
• Agentic & Automated Curation:
  • Administer, steer, and refine our agentic curation framework and Model Context Protocol (MCP) service layer to scale data profiling, validation, and entity mapping far beyond manual capacity.
  • Standardize tool definitions (FastMCP), prompt templates, and LLM-driven workflows that extract, normalize, and validate metadata from prior-knowledge sources and experimental assets.
• Biological Data Harmonization:
  • Define mapping patterns and metadata conventions for diverse experimental modalities (genomics, single-cell, screening data) to conform to the canonical schema.
  • Establish standardized conventions that allow both external prior-knowledge sources and internal experimental datasets to cleanly map into the LinkML graph architecture.
• Quality, Evaluation & Provenance:
  • Establish and maintain automated validation, LLM-assisted quality control, and CI/CD under a "curation as code" paradigm—extending existing drift and coverage gates into the places where semantic review is still manual.
  • Measure whether the knowledge is correct, not merely reproducible: gold-standard sets, inter-curator agreement, and precision/recall on automated extraction.

Who You Are

• Education & Experience: PhD with 5+ years, or MS with 8+ years, in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics, Systems Biology, or a related life science field. This is a senior individual-contributor role with organization-wide technical authority and no direct reports.
• Biological Data Lifecycle: Direct experience turning messy, real-world exploratory datasets (genomics, single-cell, screening, imaging) into structured metadata.
• Ontology & Semantic Web Expertise: Strong working knowledge of OBO Foundry standards, OWL, RDF, and SPARQL, with schema modeling experience in LinkML, Biolink, or BioCypher. Experience with Protégé, ROBOT, ODK, or SSSOM mapping sets is a plus.
• Python & Agentic AI Tooling: Proficient in modular Python (3.12, uv, pandas, Pydantic, pytest), and able to read and extend a substantial existing codebase rather than only scripting against it. Active hands-on experience with AI environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) and building agentic LLM workflows, custom MCP tools, or RAG pipelines.
• Software & Data Management: Familiarity with Git, GitHub Actions, graph/relational databases, and cloud storage (e.g., AWS S3).

The salary range for Redwood City, CA:

• Senior Engineer: $105/hr to $123/hr

Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.

Equal Opportunity Employment

We value collaboration and scientific excellence.

We believe that a culture of belonging are foundational to scientific innovation and inquiry. At Altos Labs, exceptional scientists and industry leaders from around the world work together to advance a shared mission. Our intentional focus is on Belonging, so that all employees know that they are valued for their unique perspectives. We are all accountable for sustaining an inclusive environment.

Altos Labs provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment, without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Altos prohibits unlawful discrimination and harassment. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Thank you for your interest in Altos Labs where we strive for a culture of scientific excellence, learning, and belonging.

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As set forth in Altos Labs's Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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