Senior Ontologist

Summary

Join Airbnb's Knowledge Graph team as a Senior Ontologist and play a pivotal role in designing and building ontologies from extensive cross-domain data. You will collaborate with various teams to create consistent data models, enhance data consistency, and reduce data fragmentation. This role requires expertise in ontology design, semantic technologies, and data integration. The position is US-remote eligible with occasional office work. Compensation includes a base pay range of $136,000-$160,000 USD, bonus, equity, benefits, and Employee Travel Credits.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience working in ontology and/or taxonomy roles with a degree in Information Science, Computer Science, Linguistics, or a related field
• Proven expertise in designing, implementing, and optimizing ontologies, taxonomies, and knowledge representations. Strong understanding of RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and other semantic technologies
• Hands-on experience with large-scale knowledge graph development, including schema design, entity modeling, and relationship mapping to support various business domains
• Ability to work with multiple data sources, both structured and unstructured, to build cohesive and interoperable ontological models that reduce data silos and enable data discovery and reuse
• Skilled at collaborating with data scientists / engineers, software engineers, product managers and domain experts to translate complex business needs into semantic models
• Proven ability to present complex technical information in a clear and concise way to a range of technical and non-technical audiences

Responsibilities

• Support daily operations for semantic data governance across product and knowledge graph use cases
• Collaborate with Airbnb’s Ontology Manager to create and develop consistent, extensible data models to support Airbnb’s knowledge graph
• Collaborate with product teams to design comprehensive ontologies/taxonomies that enable intuitive and interpretable knowledge structures for product features
• Navigate diverse product and data requirements to establish a governance framework, defining a unified taxonomy/ontology across multiple domains
• Work with cross-functional partners to address data fragmentation issues and standardize semantic data definitions, minimizing data inefficiencies
• Facilitate communication, collaboration, and alignment among distributed internal stakeholders
• Advocate for the importance of unified ontologies, standardized metadata, and controlled terminology

Benefits

• Bonus
• Equity
• Benefits
• Employee Travel Credits
• Remote work