Senior Ontologist

Our nation’s security depends on unlocking critical data trapped across isolated platforms, a vital national security problem that requires moving past closed, proprietary silos and building a truly open, standards based semantic layer. We need a dedicated technical leader to help us solve this challenge.

We are seeking a Senior Ontologist to lead semantic architecture and formal ontology engineering initiatives across our defense and intelligence programs. We are committed to building a truly open semantic layer that breaks down closed, proprietary data silos.

• Map legacy architectures, relational schemas, and system models to standardized upper level and defense ontologies (BFO, COO, and DIEKM).
• Author, extend, and maintain ontologies using OWL 2 DL, ensuring logical expressiveness, reasoner efficiency, and consistency.
• Build semantic integration layers to unify disparate intelligence and defense data streams across enterprise system boundaries.
• Validate and query models using SPARQL and automated description logic reasoners.
• Establish enterprise ontology governance, taxonomy alignment, and version control standards for cleared defense environments.
• Partner with mission stakeholders, system architects, and software engineering teams to turn complex domain requirements into formal semantic specifications.

Core Qualifications

• 9+ years of technical experience (software, systems, data, architecture).
• Experience mapping data structures to BFO, COO, and DIEKM.
• Proficiency in OWL 2 DL, RDF/S, Description Logics, and formal ontology design patterns.
• Mastery of ontology editors (e.g., Protégé) and enterprise triple stores / graph databases.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with semantic data validation languages (SHACL).
• Background in automated reasoning, graph query optimization, or integrating semantic pipelines with modern enterprise data architectures.

Benefits

• Top of the market salary
• Immediate 401(k) vesting
• Very flexible paid time off
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Potential relocation assistance
• Mission focused work with a high impact customer

Learn more about us, www.pavati.ai

Come build with us.

This is a Hybrid role requiring high side access. It is not a fully Remote position. Your time will be split between remote work, client sites, and cleared office space based on the specific needs of the mission.