Staff AI Engineer: Ontologies & Knowledge Graphs (Flexible)

Lockheed Martin Corporation; Cookeville (TN); On-site; USD 151,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Flexible work arrangements (e.g., 4x10

401(k) match

Paid time off & Holidays

Education Assistance

Job summary

Lockheed Martin Corporation is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to design ontologies, knowledge graphs, and production AI systems. You will work directly with users and domain experts to transform complex enterprise data into trusted knowledge for AI applications.

You will guide architectural choices, governance practices, and reusable platform capabilities while mentoring engineers and leading cross-team efforts across services, APIs, and cloud deployments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a related STEM field and nine years of relevant experience.
• Master’s degree with seven years or PhD with four years can satisfy the education and experience requirement.
• Experience developing production software in Python and architecting distributed or cloud-based systems.
• Experience architecting and deploying production AI, LLM, machine learning, or agent-based systems.
• Experience designing ontologies or knowledge graphs with RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.
• Experience leading technical work across teams and converting unclear user needs into deployed solutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with users, domain experts, data owners, and engineering teams.
• Define architectures for AI agents, ontologies, knowledge graphs, data integrations, and user applications.
• Design semantic models that represent business concepts instead of physical source structures.
• Establish methods for ontology governance, source traceability, evaluation, version control, and human review.
• Build AI agent workflows that create, test, and improve trusted knowledge artifacts.
• Lead development across services, APIs, background jobs, web applications, and graph query systems.
• Guide deployment through automated pipelines, containers, and cloud platforms.
• Resolve complex failures across AI models, applications, data sources, and infrastructure.
• Make tradeoffs among user value, security, quality, schedule, cost, and long-term support.
• Convert engagement-specific solutions into reusable platform capabilities.
• Review architecture and code for quality, security, supportability, and system fit.
• Mentor engineers and establish consistent engineering practices across teams.
• Present technical decisions, risks, and results to technical and business leaders.
• Influence technical direction across teams without formal authority.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Ontologies & knowledge graphs

RDF/OWL/SPARQL

Leadership across teams

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM

Master's degree or PhD acceptable

Tools

Django

Celery

PostgreSQL

Redis

React

TypeScript

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenShift

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Lockheed Martin Corporation is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to design ontologies, knowledge graphs, and production AI systems. You will work directly with users and domain experts to transform complex enterprise data into trusted knowledge for AI applications.

You will guide architectural choices, governance practices, and reusable platform capabilities while mentoring engineers and leading cross-team efforts across services, APIs, and cloud deployments.