Ontology Engineer- Graph & Identity

Samba connects the advertising industry. Today, a trillion dollars of media flows through platforms that don’t talk to each other, and each one measures its own results. We built the independent alternative: consented first-party data and AI that give the world’s biggest advertisers, publishers, and platforms one clear view across all of it.

The next era of advertising will run on AI agents, and those agents will need data they can trust. We’re building that foundation, and the agents that act on it. Join us and help build what the industry runs on.

You build and extend the knowledge graph schemas, derivation pipelines, and graph data models behind Samba's measurement and audience intelligence products, working with the Senior Ontologist and peer data scientists. It's a hands-on role: you own well-scoped work streams and grow your depth in semantic modeling.

• Implement Ontology Schemas: Implement and extend RDF, RDFS, and OWL ontology schemas under the Senior Ontologist's direction, adding classes, properties, and constraints, and support versioning and consistency checks.
• Validate the Graph: Build and maintain SHACL validation shapes, validating derivation outputs before graph load, and triage data quality issues and schema violations.
• Build Derivation Pipelines: Build PySpark and Databricks pipelines that aggregate raw TV viewership and web events into graph attributes such as genre, brand, and topic affinity, with incremental refresh.
• Write Production Code: Write efficient SPARQL queries and graph traversals and clean, tested, reusable Python, contributing to team tooling and documentation.
• Match and Align Entities: Apply embedding-based approaches, including semantic similarity and vector search, to entity matching and ontology alignment tasks.
• Partner Across Teams: Partner with data engineering on pipeline design and data quality, work with product and operations to turn use cases into schema updates, and join ontology design reviews.
• Grow Your Expertise: Develop expertise in World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) semantic web standards, RDF-native graph databases, and entity resolution under the Senior Ontologist's guidance.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; a Master's is preferred.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience in knowledge graph development, semantic data modeling, ontology engineering, or a closely related field.
• Working knowledge of W3C semantic web standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL) with practical experience in at least one triple store or graph database, and familiarity with SHACL or equivalent validation frameworks.
• Strong Python skills with clean, production-quality code, testing, and documentation, plus solid data modeling fundamentals: entity-relationship design, taxonomies, and hierarchies.
• Familiarity with entity resolution and data matching concepts, and a detail-oriented, proactive approach to flagging data quality issues and schema inconsistencies.
• Strongly preferred: hands-on experience with Amazon Neptune, Stardog, or an equivalent RDF-native triple store (data virtualization a plus), PySpark and Databricks, and embedding models or vector search.
• Also strongly preferred: large language model (LLM) or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) experience for information extraction or entity disambiguation, media or adtech domain knowledge, and exposure to identity resolution or device graphs.

$150,000 - $180,000 a year

Samba expects to offer a base salary of $150,000 - $180,000 per year for roles to be performed in New York; actual base salary offered will depend on various factors, including but not limited to, location, experience, and…