Ontologist, Product Knowledge

Amazon • Seattle, WA

7d • Onsite

About The Position

The Product Knowledge Ontology Team aims to establish a standardized, semantically rich, easily discoverable, extensible, and universally applicable body of product knowledge. This knowledge will be consistently used across customer shopping experiences, selling partner listing experiences, and for internal enrichment of product data. The team's goal is to make product knowledge compelling, easy to use, and feature-rich, enabling a semantic understanding of customer intent for shopping missions or seller offerings, thereby making experiences more intuitive for all customers. As an Ontologist, you will join a global team of knowledge builders to develop world-class, intuitive, and comprehensive taxonomy and ontology models to optimize product discovery for Amazon's web and mobile experiences. You will collaborate with business partners, data science, and engineering teams to deliver knowledge-based solutions that enhance product discoverability. This role will directly impact the customer experience and the company’s product knowledge foundation.

Requirements

• Experience building ontologies, taxonomies, and semantic relation frameworks
• Degree in Library Science, Information Systems, Linguistics or equivalent professional experience
• 3+ years of relevant work experience working in ontology and/or taxonomy roles
• Proven skills in data retrieval and data research techniques
• Ability to quickly understand complex processes and communicate them in simple language
• Ability to communicate knowledge-based requirements and needs to engineering and retail teams
• Familiarity with 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. Protégé, TopQuadrant products, PoolParty)
• Detail-oriented problem-solving, ability to work in fast-changing environment and manage ambiguity
• Proven track record of strong communication and interpersonal skills

Nice To Haves

• 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-order classes, punning, property inheritance)
• Familiarity with software engineering life cycle
• Familiarity with ontology manipulation programming libraries
• Exposure to data science and/or machine learning, including graph embeddings

Responsibilities

• Develop logical, semantically rich, and extensible data models for Amazon's expansive product catalog.
• Ensure ontologies provide comprehensive sub-domain coverage available for machine ingestion and inference.
• Research worldwide understanding of Amazon products to develop scalable data models that solve customer problems and enhance product discoverability.
• Create new schema using Generative Artificial Intelligence (generative AI) models.
• Expand existing data retrieval techniques by utilizing the extensive product catalog and query languages.
• Analyze website metrics and product discovery behaviors to make data-driven decisions on optimizing knowledge graph data models globally.
• Contribute to the development of new tool features and processes for the Ontology team.
• Drive alignment to ontology modeling and technology best practices and principles within the organization and across Amazon.
• Coordinate cross-functional projects with a broad range of technical and non-technical teams.

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
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

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