Senior Ontologist & Knowledge Graph Architect

Samba; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is seeking a Senior Ontologist to own and govern Samba TV's knowledge graph ontologies. You will design and implement RDF/OWL schemas, SHACL shapes, and entity-resolution processes at scale, collaborating with data engineers and data scientists to productionize ontologies and graph pipelines.

You will apply embedding-based and LLM-augmented methods, participate in design reviews, and mentor junior staff, while balancing expressivity and performance in a data-rich media domain.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of hands-on ontology engineering or knowledge graph development

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, development, and versioning of core ontologies in RDF/RDFS/OWL
• Author and maintain SHACL shapes for post-load graph validation
• Define derivation schemas for derived attributes and lifecycle signals
• Establish ontology design standards and versioning, align with industry schemas
• Lead ontology design reviews with cross-functional teams
• Define aggregation/derivation logic for events to graph attributes
• Build and maintain production-quality KG pipelines in Python and SPARQL
• Perform entity resolution and record linkage to canonical KG nodes
• Develop enrichment workflows integrating third-party data into the KG
• Apply embedding/LLM approaches to ontology mapping and similarity
• Support content/semantic embedding pipelines for GraphRAG solutions
• Mentor Ontology Engineers and junior data scientists

Skills

Python

SPARQL

Ontology design

Semantic modeling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Info Science/Computational Linguistics/Mathematics

Master’s or PhD preferred

Tools

Amazon Neptune

Stardog

GraphDB

Jena

Job description

Samba is seeking a Senior Ontologist to own and govern Samba TV's knowledge graph ontologies. You will design and implement RDF/OWL schemas, SHACL shapes, and entity-resolution processes at scale, collaborating with data engineers and data scientists to productionize ontologies and graph pipelines.

You will apply embedding-based and LLM-augmented methods, participate in design reviews, and mentor junior staff, while balancing expressivity and performance in a data-rich media domain.