Senior Ontologist

Cyberhill Partners • Austin, TX

5d

About The Position

Cyberhill is seeking a highly experienced Senior Ontologist to support its artificial intelligence initiatives. The role focuses on developing and maintaining Cyberhill’s core upper ontology and extending it with domain- and client-specific ontologies. The Senior Ontologist will collaborate with technical teams and subject matter experts to build scalable, semantically grounded AI solutions for enterprise applications and help shape the semantic foundations of AI applications across diverse industries and client environments.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional experience in ontology development, knowledge representation, or semantic technologies within enterprise environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Computational Linguistics, Library and Information Science, Computer Science, or a related field emphasizing logic, analytical reasoning, and critical thinking.
• Strong knowledge of ontology and knowledge representation languages, including RDF/RDFS, OWL, CLIF, and CycL.
• Experience with ontology constraint and validation languages, such as SHACL and ShEx.
• Proficiency with ontology development tools, such as Protégé or TopBraid.
• Working knowledge of rule-based reasoning languages and frameworks, including SWRL, Datalog, or Drools.
• Ability to develop, execute, and troubleshoot SPARQL queries.
• Familiarity with W3C standards and other open ontology and semantic web standards.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, documentation, and communication skills.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in multidisciplinary teams and work independently in a fast-paced environment.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree in Philosophy, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Library and Information Science, or a related discipline.
• Experience leading technical projects, managing teams, or coordinating ontology development initiatives.
• Experience with inference engine development, inference path architecture, or inference debugging.
• Demonstrated success designing or implementing enterprise-scale, ontology-driven AI solutions.
• Experience working with relational databases and SQL.
• Experience developing or integrating enterprise knowledge graphs and semantic reasoning applications.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with fellow ontologists to design, develop, maintain, and enhance Cyberhill’s core and domain-specific ontologies.
• Establish and promote ontology development standards, best practices, and quality assurance processes.
• Partner with client subject matter experts to gather domain knowledge, define competency questions, and validate ontology models against client data.
• Develop and maintain ontology artifacts, including RDF and Turtle files, visualizations, and technical documentation.
• Ensure consistency, interoperability, and comprehensive coverage across ontology layers.
• Develop, review, and troubleshoot RML/R2RML mappings to represent the semantic meaning of enterprise data sources.
• Support the integration of ontologies into AI applications, knowledge graphs, and semantic reasoning systems.
• Communicate complex ontological concepts to technical teams, business stakeholders, and client representatives.
• Adapt ontology models to emerging domains, evolving client requirements, and new AI use cases.

What This Job Offers

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