Senior Ontologist: Knowledge Graph & Identity

Samba; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Samba is a media intelligence company seeking a Senior Ontologist to lead the design, development, and governance of its knowledge graph. You will define ontology classes, properties, and constraints, author SHACL shapes, and drive production pipelines with data eng and data science peers.

The role emphasizes scalable graph models and semantic integration across content and identity data. You will collaborate with product and engineering, mentor junior ontology engineers, and push standards

Qualifications

• Hands-on ontology engineering and semantic data modeling at scale.
• Proven production ontologies and graph schemas.
• Experience with SHACL shapes and RDF/OWL ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end ontology design, development, and governance for Samba's knowledge graph.
• Develop SHACL shapes, derive-attribute schemas, and document design standards.
• Lead reviews with product and data teams; balance expressivity, scalability, and performance.
• Build and maintain production-grade knowledge graph pipelines in Python and SPARQL.
• Implement entity resolution, data enrichment, and graph-based AI integration.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Semantic data modeling

Knowledge graph development

Python

SPARQL

SHACL

Entity resolution

Graph pipelines

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or related field

Master's or PhD strongly preferred

Tools

Amazon Neptune

Stardog

Jena

Databricks/PySpark

Job description

Samba is a media intelligence company seeking a Senior Ontologist to lead the design, development, and governance of its knowledge graph. You will define ontology classes, properties, and constraints, author SHACL shapes, and drive production pipelines with data eng and data science peers.

The role emphasizes scalable graph models and semantic integration across content and identity data. You will collaborate with product and engineering, mentor junior ontology engineers, and push standards