Senior Ontology Engineer: Knowledge Graph & AI

Technology Service Corporation; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP participation

401k Plan

Flexible Work Schedules

Tuition Reimbursement

Co-Sponsored Health Plan

Paid Leave

Job summary

TSC seeks a Senior Ontology Engineer in King George/Dahlgren, VA to design, develop, and maintain ontological frameworks and knowledge graphs for defense mission engineering programs.

The ideal candidate combines formal ontology expertise with hands-on data integration, graph databases, and LLM-enabled AI pipelines. US citizenship and SECRET clearance required; on-site role with competitive compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or a related discipline; equivalent experience considered.
• PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience, MA/MS with 5+ years of relevant experience, or BA/BS with 7+ years.
• Hands-on experience with knowledge graph technologies including RDF, SPARQL, SHACL, and OWL for DoD or enterprise use cases.
• Experience with schema design, ontology management, and knowledge graph curation.
• Experience designing and developing end-to-end knowledge graph and AI data pipelines, including integration with LLMs or similar models.
• Familiarity with graph database platforms such as Stardog, Blazegraph, Neo4j, or Amazon Neptune.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain formal ontologies using OWL, RDF/RDFS, and SPARQL aligned with DoD mission engineering requirements and semantic interoperability standards.
• Build and deploy knowledge graph solutions that integrate structured and unstructured data sources across heterogeneous, multi-domain defense systems.
• Apply and extend upper-level ontology frameworks, ensuring alignment with DoD and IC data standards.
• Design and implement graph-based AI and semantic solutions, including LLM-integrated pipelines, RAG architectures, and agentic workflows that leverage knowledge graph representations.
• Collaborate with engineers, systems architects, and mission-domain SMEs to translate operational requirements into actionable ontological models and knowledge architectures.
• Support semantic integration and data interoperability efforts across legacy and modern system architectures, including graph database deployments (e.g., Stardog, Neptune, Neo4j).
• Lead the development and writing of technical approaches for proposals related to supporting the Navy adopt AI technologies.

Skills

Ontology engineering

Knowledge graphs

RDF/OWL/SPARQL

Data integration

Graph databases

LLM integration

Technical writing

Team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher

PhD with 2+ years

MA/MS with 5+ years

BA/BS with 7+ years

Equivalent experience considered

Tools

Stardog

Amazon Neptune

Neo4j

Blazegraph

rdflib

owlready2

Job description

TSC seeks a Senior Ontology Engineer in King George/Dahlgren, VA to design, develop, and maintain ontological frameworks and knowledge graphs for defense mission engineering programs.

The ideal candidate combines formal ontology expertise with hands-on data integration, graph databases, and LLM-enabled AI pipelines. US citizenship and SECRET clearance required; on-site role with competitive compensation and benefits.