Principal Data Engineer - Semantic Layer

At Met Life, data isn’t just a tool - it is a catalyst for growth. As part of our Data & Analytics organization, you’ll unlock trusted insights that drive bold decisions, power personalized customer experiences, and deliver lasting business impact. Your skills in AI, predictive modeling, and advanced analytics will help solve complex challenges, scale solutions globally, and fuel innovation across every region.

We’re building the future of data - one that’s governed responsibly, engineered for scalability, and designed for growth. When you join us, you’re not just supporting the business - you’re empowering it. Let’s transform insight into impact and data into action, together.

The Principal Data Engineer – Semantic Layer is a senior technical role responsible for designing, building, and governing Met Life's enterprise Semantic Layer. This engineer will serve as the primary practitioner translating complex, distributed data assets into well-structured, business-consumable ontologies and semantic models. Leveraging OWL (Web Ontology Language), RDF, SPARQL, and modern Semantic Layer platforms, the engineer will create a unified, trustworthy representation of enterprise data that powers analytics, AI/ML, and regulatory reporting across the organization.

This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, knowledge engineering, and enterprise architecture. The successful candidate will partner with data governance, platform engineering, business stakeholders, and the Enterprise Metadata team to embed semantic interoperability into Met Life's data ecosystem.

• Architect and implement an enterprise-grade Semantic Layer using platforms such as Stardog, Tim .ai, AtScale, dbt Semantic Layer, or Databricks/ Microsoft Fabric Semantic Models, establishing a single source of truth for business metrics and dimensions.
• Design and publish OWL 2 ontologies and RDF-based data models that encode business concepts, relationships, and constraints as formal, machine-readable knowledge graphs.
• Develop and maintain semantic models in OWL/XML, RDF/XML, and JSON-LD serialization formats, ensuring alignment with W3C, Dublin Core, SKOS, and PROV-O standards.
• Define and govern reusable business metrics, KPIs, and calculated measures within the Semantic Layer to ensure consistent, governed consumption across BI, reporting, and AI use cases.
• Build and maintain SPARQL query templates and OWL reasoning rules that enable downstream consumers to query semantic models efficiently.
• Integrate the Semantic Layer platform with enterprise data platforms including Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, and Delta Lake, enabling high-performance federated query execution.
• Develop and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines that populate and synchronize semantic models with upstream source systems, data lakes, and data warehouses.
• Enable direct connectivity between the Semantic Layer and BI/analytics tools (Power BI, Cognos Analytics) via JDBC/ODBC, MDX, and DAX interfaces.
• Design and expose REST and GraphQL APIs that provide downstream applications, AI agents, and self-service analytics platforms with structured access to semantic models.
• Support LLM-based systems by providing structured ontology exports consumable by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and AI co-pilots.
• Partner with the Enterprise Metadata team to align semantic model definitions with the enterprise data catalog (Collibra, or equivalent), ensuring bidirectional metadata traceability.
• Implement and enforce metadata standards including business glossary linkage, data lineage tagging, and classification schemes across all semantic assets.
• Embed data quality validation rules and data contract specifications within the Semantic Layer to guarantee fitness-for-use at point of consumption.
• Support data governance initiatives including HIPAA compliance, data residency, and access control enforcement through semantic model-level row and column security.
• Maintain a governed registry of semantic model versions enabling auditability and rollback in regulated environments.

• Act as the primary…