Strategic Lead, Semantic & Knowledge Engineering

Novartis Group Companies; East Hanover (NJ); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 328,000; Full time

Job summary

The Novartis Group Companies seek an Associate Director of Semantic and Knowledge Engineering to design, govern, and advance enterprise semantic models across products and AI-enabled platforms. You will collaborate with product, analytics, and engineering teams to embed semantic capabilities into workflows, RAG, and context-aware search.

Ideal applicants have 6+ years in semantic technologies, ontology development, and data governance, with experience in RDF/OWL, SKOS, and SPARQL.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field required; advanced degree preferred.
• 6+ years of progressive experience in semantic technologies, knowledge engineering, metadata management, or related areas.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining ontologies, taxonomies, and semantic models (RDF/OWL, SKOS, SPARQL).
• Experience enabling AI grounding, RAG/GraphRAG, enterprise search, and contextual search ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and govern enterprise semantic models, ontologies, taxonomies, and vocabularies.
• Collaborate with Product, Applied AI, Analytics, and Platform Engineering to embed semantic capabilities into products and workflows.
• Provide metadata governance and lifecycle management for enterprise knowledge assets.
• Evaluate emerging semantic technologies and contribute to scalable architecture guidance.
• Mentor junior semantic/knowledge engineers and promote reusable engineering patterns.
• Communicate technical trade-offs and risks to stakeholders across teams.

Skills

Semantic technologies

Knowledge engineering

Metadata management

Data architecture

Data product engineering

AI-enabled data platforms

Ontologies and taxonomies

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IS/AI/Data Science

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

RDF/OWL

SKOS

SPARQL

Graph databases

Knowledge graphs

Metadata catalogs

Data lineage

Semantic APIs

Job description

The Novartis Group Companies seek an Associate Director of Semantic and Knowledge Engineering to design, govern, and advance enterprise semantic models across products and AI-enabled platforms. You will collaborate with product, analytics, and engineering teams to embed semantic capabilities into workflows, RAG, and context-aware search.

Ideal applicants have 6+ years in semantic technologies, ontology development, and data governance, with experience in RDF/OWL, SKOS, and SPARQL.