Senior Enterprise Ontologist

GEICO • Palo Alto, CA

4d

About The Position

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities. Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive through relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact for our company through our shared purpose. When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported and proud to work here. That’s why we offer The GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards and Great Careers. We are seeking an experienced and innovative Senior Enterprise Ontologist to lead the design and development of enterprise ontologies, knowledge graphs and semantic models tailored for the insurance domain. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams including engineering, product, AI, and various business teams to identify and analyze data sources, develop taxonomies, and create semantic models that enable effective search, retrieval, and analysis of information. Your expertise in ontology engineering and it’s role in enhancing NLP and AI/ML use cases will be critical in developing cutting-edge solutions that drive innovation, automation and add value to our business. This role will be critical in driving a common understanding and language for the business across all domains. This individual will be part of a team responsible for leveraging semantic platforms and models to accelerate the implementation of context management and agentic AI to address critical business priorities for the data and AI teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Linguistics, Information Science, or a related field with a focus on knowledge representation.
• 6+ years of hands-on experience in the design, development, and maintenance of large-scale, enterprise-level ontologies.
• Expert knowledge of semantic web standards: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and SPARQL.
• Significant experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, Stardog, etc.).
• Proven experience with using ontology development tools.
• Strong programming skills in languages for data manipulation, e.g. SQL, Cipher, Python, Scala, Java.
• Experience supporting AI/ML, advanced analytics, and real-time data applications.
• Experience with generative AI models, prompt engineering and parameter tuning
• Strong understanding of data lineage and governance standards in a regulated industry
• Strong familiarity with governance and compliance frameworks (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, NYDFS requirements etc.).
• Excellent communication skills, capable of translating the value of semantic technology to business and technology leaders.

Nice To Haves

• Significant experience in the insurance or financial services industry is highly preferred.
• Familiarity with industry-specific data models or ontologies (e.g., ACORD standards, Financial Industry Business Ontology – FIBO, Financial Regulation Ontology – FRO).
• Experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for interrogating unstructured documents and Text-to-SQL.
• Strong understanding of data modeling (conceptual, logical, physical), relational and non-relational databases.
• Knowledge of designing data pipelines using ETL/ELT tools (e.g., Apache Airflow, dbt).
• Knowledge of cloud architecture, APIs, and event-driven data systems (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).

Responsibilities

• Design, model, and implement formal ontologies to standardize and integrate diverse insurance data, including unstructured documents (e.g., policy contracts, loss reports) and structured core systems data
• Apply best practices in ontology development and management to improve data understanding, data quality and accessibility.
• Establish governance standards for ontology development, ensuring models evolve with the business, i.e. are extensible and auditable for regulatory reporting.
• Conduct requirement gathering with business stakeholders (e.g. underwriters, actuaries, legal/compliance, claims specialists) to translate complex domain knowledge into scalable semantic models and structures.
• Provide training and guidance to stakeholders on ontology usage and best practices for data organization.
• Conduct ontology mapping and integration from source systems to ontological structures, e.g. knowledge graphs to facilitate data interoperability and integration across systems.
• Collaborate with domain teams to define and document enterprise data models in alignment with defined ontologies
• Evaluate ontologies and knowledge graphs created through automated semantic layer tools to ensure accurate representation of business; facilitate modeling of accurate ontologies in these tools
• Partner with data engineering team to outline vision for convergence of enterprise ontologies, enterprise data models and semantic models and layers
• Evaluate and recommend semantic technologies, including graph databases and reasoning engines best suited for handling high-volume, highly interconnected data.
• Partner with AI/ML teams to leverage ontologies and knowledge graphs for advanced use cases including agentic AI context management.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Total Rewards program that offers personalized coverage tailor-made for you and your family’s overall well-being.
• Financial benefits including market-competitive compensation; a 401K savings plan vested from day one that offers a 6% match; performance and recognition-based incentives; and tuition assistance.
• Access to additional benefits like mental healthcare as well as fertility and adoption assistance.
• Supports flexibility- We provide workplace flexibility as well as our GEICO Flex program, which offers the ability to work from anywhere in the US for up to four weeks per year.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level