Ontology & Semantic Architect

Overview

The Ontology & Semantic Architect is a strategic and technically strong leader responsible for building and guiding our Ontology strategy. This person is responsible for designing, governing, and scaling the semantic blueprints that give meaning and structure to our enterprise data. Ontology in our organization defines the concepts, relationships, and rules that shape how systems understand and interact with data—enabling consistency, interoperability, advanced analytics, and AI-driven capabilities.

The role will oversee the development and stewardship of our enterprise ontology across Microsoft Fabric (including Fabric IQ) and Palantir platforms. This leader will collaborate across business and technical teams to ensure that our semantic models accurately reflect business definitions, enable high-confidence data usage, support cross-system integration, and power next-generation analytics and AI.

**This position requires Eastern or Central Time Zone availability.**

“For this position, qualified candidates must be legally authorized to be employed in the United States. Cook does not intend to provide sponsorship for employment visa status for this employment position now or in the future.”

Responsibilities

Leadership & Governance

• Ensuring strong semantic modeling, data design, and governance practices.
• Establish standards, processes, and operating models for consistent ontology creation, maintenance, and evolution.
• Serve as the primary decision-maker for semantic definitions, conceptual models, and enterprise vocabulary management.

Ontology Development & Stewardship

• Oversee the design and maintenance of ontologies that accurately represent business concepts, relationships, hierarchies, and constraints.
• Partner with domain experts to ensure semantic models reflect real business processes and data usage patterns.
• Ensure ontologies support interoperability across applications, datasets, APIs, and analytic platforms.
• Guide the extension of ontologies to support new product lines, operational processes, or regulatory needs.

Fabric IQ & Palantir Oversight

• Lead the creation and management of semantic models within Microsoft Fabric IQ, including domain modeling, semantic enrichment, and unified business definitions.
• Oversee the design and governance of Palantir Ontology artifacts, including object types, relationships, functions, schema transformations, and operational pipelines.
• Ensure consistency and alignment between semantic models implemented in Palantir and those implemented in Fabric.
• Drive best practices for building scalable data models, ontology-driven access patterns, and knowledge graph structures across platforms.

Semantic Architecture & Integration

• Define the enterprise semantic architecture, including how ontologies integrate with data products, data pipelines, APIs, and AI/ML solutions.
• Establish and maintain a semantic layer strategy to ensure business-aligned meaning across systems.
• Partner with integration and API teams to ensure semantic alignment in data contracts and experience APIs.
• Promote an ontology-driven approach to data interoperability, lineage, data quality, and governance.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement

• Enable AI and ML teams by providing well-structured, semantically rich data environments.
• Collaborate on the development of AI agents and semantic reasoning features that depend on precise data meaning.
• Support use cases such as natural language querying, knowledge graph analytics, and intelligent automation.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with product teams, business stakeholders, data stewards, engineers, and analytics teams to ensure trusted data meaning across the enterprise.
• Act as the bridge between business conceptual understanding and technical implementation.
• Guide teams on how to use and extend ontology assets effectively in daily workflows.

Qualifications

Essential Regional or Country RequirementsEducation and/or Work Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Technology, or related
• 7 years of experience in data architecture, semantic modeling, knowledge representation, or related fields.

Knowledge and Skills and/or Abilities

• This role requires mastery in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data concepts, including the ability to assess feasibility and risk of AI use cases, design or coordinate workflow-level AI solutions, guide teams on responsible AI governance, mentor others, and contribute to organizational policies and ethical decision-making.
• Experience leading teams focused on ontology, semantic modeling, or enterprise data design.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric
• Hands-on experience with Palantir Foundry Ontology, including object modeling
• Deep understanding of conceptual, logical, and semantic data modeling.
• Strong understanding of data governance, metadata management, data lineage, and interoperability principles.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to simplify complex data concepts for varied audiences.
• Requires occasional early morning or evening teleconferences
• Availability and willingness to travel on company business based on requirements of the role (domestically and internationally)

Preferred

• Background in knowledge graphs, RDF/OWL, or semantic reasoning frameworks.
• Experience in designing semantic layers for BI, analytics, and AI use cases.
• Familiarity with API modeling, data contracts, or domain-driven design.
• Experience operating in distributed, highly cross-functional environments.

Physical Requirements

• Works under general office environmental conditions
• Sits for extended periods, utilizes close visual acuity working with computers, etc.