Ontology Engineer

PeopleTec, Inc.•Huntsville, AL

4d•Onsite

About The Position

PeopleTec is seeking an Ontology Engineer to support the design and governance of an ontology ecosystem underpinning a digital engineering / digital thread effort at our Huntsville, AL location. This role will design and maintain ontologies that allow data from multiple engineering tools and disciplines to be represented consistently, enabling traceability and interoperability across the engineering lifecycle.

Requirements

10-15 years in systems engineering, knowledge representation, or digital engineering, with demonstrated ontology development on complex engineered systems.
Demonstrated experience developing ontologies for complex engineered systems, with evidence of applying that work in a practical or production context.
Hands-on expertise with formal ontology representation (e.g., OWL/RDFS) and/or property graph schema design, along with corresponding query and validation approaches (e.g., SPARQL/SHACL, or Gremlin/Cypher and schema validation tooling).
Practical experience with ontology editing tools such as Protégé.
Working knowledge of BFO and CCO.
Experience with at least one graph-based data store used to host ontology or linked data (e.g., a triplestore such as GraphDB, Stardog, or Apache Jena Fuseki; or a property graph database such as Neo4j or JanusGraph).
Working knowledge of MBSE concepts and tools (e.g., Cameo/MagicDraw, SysML) sufficient to align model data with ontology structures.
Programming proficiency in Python for ontology tooling, automation, and validation pipelines.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate ontology concepts for engineers and stakeholders without formal ontology backgrounds.
Must be a U.S. Citizen.
An active DoD Secret clearance is required to perform this work. Candidates are required to have an active Secret clearance upon hire (or the able to obtain), and the ability to maintain this level of clearance during their employment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with semantic data integration or digital thread implementations in an engineering or enterprise context.
Active DoD Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.
Familiarity with the Ontology Modeling Language (OML) or similar model-driven ontology approaches.
Familiarity with SysML v2.
Familiarity with DoD digital engineering policy and practices (e.g., DoDI 5000.97, DoD Digital Engineering Strategy).
Experience with ontology governance practices.
Experience integrating ontologies with knowledge graphs or property graph databases, in addition to triplestores.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain ontologies in OWL, extending Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Common Core Ontologies (CCO), to represent engineering concepts across multiple disciplines and domains.
Maintain namespace and identifier conventions, modular organization of ontology content, versioning, and dependency relationships between ontology modules.
Establish conventions for aligning model elements from MBSE tools (e.g., Cameo/MagicDraw, SysML) and other engineering tools with ontology classes, supporting consistent semantic tagging across tools.
Develop validation logic (e.g., SHACL or equivalent schema validation) and apply reasoning to check ontology consistency and data conformance.
Author queries (e.g., SPARQL or equivalent) to support traceability, impact analysis, and reporting needs.
Define and document ontology governance practices: modeling conventions, review and approval processes, reuse principles, and onboarding guidance for engineering teams and tool integrators.
Collaborate with systems engineers, software developers, and tool integration teams to ensure ontologies meet practical, real-world data exchange needs across MBSE, PLM, simulation, and other engineering tools.
Communicate ontology design decisions and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.