Senior Data Ontologist

Job Overview

Senior Data Ontologist provides expert-level knowledge engineering support to intelligence and mission-focused organizations, enabling enhanced data interoperability, ISR integration, and machine-speed decision advantage across enterprise environments. This role leads the development, governance, and operationalization of ontologies, taxonomies, and semantic models that support intelligence analysis, targeting, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED), and multi-domain operations. The position requires deep technical expertise in semantic technologies, coupled with demonstrated experience supporting Department of Defense (DoW) and Intelligence Community (IC) missions.

The individual’s work advances modernization priorities and contributes to the foundational data architecture necessary for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) integration.

• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise ontologies, taxonomies, vocabularies, and knowledge models aligned with Air Force mission needs.
• Model complex ISR, threat, operational, and geopolitical domains.
• Ensure semantic alignment with DoW, Joint, and IC data standards including UCore, NIEM, STIX/TAXII, and JC3
  
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• Identify, analyze, and address data interoperability and sharing challenges across multi-domain operations.

• Collaborate with intelligence analysts, data engineers, and AI/ML teams to integrate ontologies into ISR workflows, analytic tools, and knowledge graph architectures.
• Support automated reasoning, entity resolution, and cross-domain data fusion to improve analytic accuracy and timeliness.
• Provide technical guidance for integrating semantic models into cloud, data fabric, and JADC2-aligned environments.

• Conduct semantic quality assessments, reasoning validation, and consistency checks.
• Ensure compliance with DoW data management policies, IC standards, and Air Force enterprise architecture requirements.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, Linguistics, or related field.
• Minimum seven (7) years of experience developing ontologies and semantic models in operational or enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated expertise with open source technologies and reasoning engines.
• Proven experience supporting DoW, preferably within ISR or all-source analysis environments.

• Experience integrating ontologies with AI/ML pipelines, LLM‑enabled systems, or automation frameworks.
• Knowledge of JADC2, ABMS, and cross‑domain interoperability requirements.