Ontology Leader

GEP Clark, Clark, New Jersey, United States

Full Time

Job Description

Welcome to GEP

Who We Are

GEP, with over 30 offices internationally, is the fastest growing procurement and supply chain solutions firm – consulting, software and managed services. GEP has succeeded by being smart and creative; solving complex problems and finding opportunities for the world’s largest organizations.

How You Grow at GEP

We recognize people who make a genuine difference, workhard and drive achievements. Results are noticed and rewarded. It’s how youwill grow a career at GEP, and in a much shorter time frame than at other firms.

Celebrating Everyone

GEP succeeds through the ideas and creativity of our team members so we embrace people of all experiences, nationalities, abilities,cultures, races, gender identities, sexual orientations and ages. What makesyou unique and different is celebrated and will help GEP stand out even more.

And we are a women-founded and
-owned company so our foundation is making GEP agreat place to work for women, a place where women can learn, advance and giveback.

Are You One of Us

We're building GEP's Distributed Intelligent Data Layer, asemantic platform for procurement running on a custom technical stack. At itscore is a GEP-owned procurement ontology: the shared model of products,categories, suppliers, contracts and spend that our AI products, agents and analytics are built on.

We're looking for a senior ontology leader to own that ontology end to end: lead the team ofontologists who build it, work across Consulting, Product, Engineering and AIto make it the shared foundation, and set the framework that keeps it governed as it scales. You'll stay hands-on, modeling the hard parts, solving AI and knowledge use cases, and shaping the technical solution.

This is a hybrid role with3 days on-site in GEP’s Clark, NJ Headquarters. Level will be based on experience and scope of prior leadership.

Lead the ontology and the team

• Own the Ontology: Setthe vision, roadmap and modeling architecture (RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL) forGEP's procurement ontology, and decide where it adopts, extends or diverges from UNSPSC, eClass and GS1.
• Lead the Ontologists: Hire,mentor and grow a team of ontologists and knowledge engineers; run design reviews, make the final call on hard modeling decisions, and oversee annotation guidelines and quality.
• Consulting and product owners: Turn consultants' procurement expertise into reusable ontology structures, and partner with product owners to prioritize ontology work against product roadmaps and drive adoption.
• Engineering, AI and leadership: Align with architects, data engineers and data scientist son how the ontology is consumed, and explain its value and trade-offs to executives and clients.

Solve AIand knowledge use cases, hands-on

• Deliver use cases: Leadand personally contribute to spend classification, entity resolution,semantic search, knowledge-graph-grounded retrieval (GraphRAG) for AIagents, and document knowledge extraction, across procurement and adjacent domains.
• Shape the technical solution: Guide decisions on SPARQL and Cypher query surfaces, OWL-RLreasoning, SHACL validation, multi-tenant design, and how the ontology grounds and evaluates LLM outputs.

Build thegovernance and maintenance framework

• Operating model: Define ownership, change control, versioning, release cadence, and how client extensions coexist with, or get promoted into, the core ontology.
• Quality and feedback: Automate testing (SHACL, competency questions, regression against real data) andset up a feedback loop from consultants, products and AI pipelines into prioritized changes.

What You Should Bring

• Experience: 15+ yearsin knowledge engineering, semantic technology or information architecture,including 8+ years building…