Ontologist III, Product Knowledge Ontology

Amazon • Seattle, WA

3d • $102,700 - $179,700 • Onsite

About The Position

The vision of the Product Knowledge Ontology Team is to provide a standardized, semantically rich, easily discoverable, extensible, and universally applicable body of product knowledge that can be consistently utilized across customer shopping experiences, selling partner listing experiences and internal enrichment of product data. We aim to make product knowledge compelling, easy to use, and feature rich. Our work to build comprehensive product knowledge allows us to semantically understand a customer’s intent – whether that is a shopping mission or a seller offering products. We strive to make these experiences more intuitive for all customers. As a Senior Ontologist, you work on a global team of knowledge builders to deliver world-class, intuitive, and comprehensive taxonomy and ontology models to optimize product discovery for Amazon web and mobile experiences. You collaborate with business partners, data science and engineering teams to deliver knowledge-based solutions to enable product discoverability for customers. In this role, you will directly impact the customer experience as well as the company’s product knowledge foundation.

Requirements

• Experience in data retrieval techniques
• Degree in Library Science, Information Systems, Linguistics or equivalent professional experience
• 5+ years of relevant work experience working in ontology and/or taxonomy roles
• Ability to quickly understand complex processes and communicate them in simple language
• Experience creating and communicating technical requirements to engineering teams
• Ability to communicate to senior leadership (Director and VP levels)
• Experience with generative AI (e.g. creating prompts)
• Knowledge of Semantic Web technologies (RDF/s, OWL), query languages (SPARQL) and validation/reasoning standards (SHACL, SPIN)
• Knowledge of open-source and commercial ontology engineering editors (e.g. Protege, TopQuadrant products, PoolParty)
• Detail-oriented problem solver who is able to work in fast-changing environment and manage ambiguity

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of software development lifecycle, including design, development, test, build, deployment processes and timelines
• Exposure to data science and/or machine learning, including graph embeddings
• Master’s degree in Library Science, Information Systems, Linguistics or other relevant fields
• Experience building ontologies in the e-commerce and semantic search spaces
• Experience working with schema-level constructs (e.g. higher-level classes, punning, property inheritance)
• Familiarity with ontology manipulation programming libraries

Responsibilities

• Develop logical, semantically rich, and extensible data models for Amazon's extensive product catalog
• Ensure our ontologies provide comprehensive domain coverage that are available for both human and machine ingestion and inference
• Create new schema using Generative Artificial Intelligence (generative AI) models
• Analyze website metrics and product discovery behaviors to make data-driven decisions on optimizing our knowledge graph data models globally
• Expand and refine the expansion of data retrieval techniques to utilize our extensive knowledge graph
• Contribute to team goal setting and future state vision
• Drive and coordinate cross-functional projects with a broad range of merchandisers, engineers, designers, and other groups that may include architecting new data solutions
• Develop team operational excellence programs, data quality initiatives and process simplifications
• Evangelize ontology and semantic technologies within and across teams at Amazon
• Develop and refine data governance and processes used by global Ontologists
• Mentor and influence peers

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree