Product Ontology Designer

What You Will Do: We're building GEP's Distributed Intelligent Data Layer, a semantic platform for procurement running on custom technical stack. We're looking for a Product Ontology Designer who will define the product and procurement ontology that everything else is built on: the classes, relationships, taxonomies and rules that model products, categories, suppliers and spend. You'll translate procurement domain knowledge into rigorous RDF/OWL models, validate them against both query surfaces (SPARQL and Cypher), align them to industry standards, and set the governance that keeps the ontology consistent as it scales across tenants. Design the product/procurement ontology: Model classes, properties, relationships and taxonomies for products, categories, suppliers and spend using RDF, OWL and SKOS.Author validation & inference rules: Define SHACL constraints and reasoning rules that keep data correct and enable inference (later materialized via OWL-RL).Align to standards: Map and reconcile against procurement standards and client schemes (UNSPSC, eClass, GS1), resolving overlaps and gaps. Ground the model in real data: Partner with domain SMEs and data engineers to validate the ontology against real catalog and spend data and query patterns, on both SPARQL and Cypher. Own governance: Establish versioning, change control, naming conventions and documentation so the ontology stays coherent as it grows. Enable the annotators: Write and maintain the data-cleaning and annotation guidelines that annotators apply when mapping records and relationships to the ontology, and adjudicate the hard classification cases. What You Should Bring

Education: Degree in Computer Science, Information/Library Science, Linguistics, or a related field (advanced degree a plus).

Experience: 3+ years building ontologies, taxonomies or knowledge models in production, ideally over product, catalog or master data. Equivalent domains are welcome; we care about the modeling skill. Ontology and taxonomy modeling skills: RDF, OWL and SKOS.Constraints and reasoning skills: SHACL, and familiarity with rule-based inference (OWL-RL / SWRL).Ontology tooling skills: Protégé, TopBraid, PoolParty or comparable. SPARQL (and ideally Cypher/openCypher) for validating and querying models against real data. Domain grounding in procurement, product catalog, spend classification or master data, or the ability to ramp on it quickly. Mindset: Rigor, conceptual clarity, and a drive to build a model that stays clean under real-world messiness. Collaboration: Strong communication skills and comfort translating between domain SMEs and engineers in a hybrid, agile team.

Nice to have: (any of these makes you stand out):Procurement / product standards: UNSPSC, eClass, GS1.Entity resolution and data-quality practices. Working with Oxigraph, Apache AGE, or comparable triple stores (Apache Jena, GraphDB) directly. Defining data-cleaning / annotation guidelines and working with data curators. This is a hybrid role with 3 days on-site in GEP’s Clark, NJ Headquarters.

Salary Range: $125,000 – $170,000 annually, based on experience and qualifications. Additional Compensation: Eligible for a performance-based bonus tied to individual and company performance.

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) with a 3% company match, paid time off, company holidays, and professional development opportunities.