Knowledge Engineer - Generative AI Platform and Cortex

Role Description

Peraton Labs is seeking a Senior Knowledge Engineer to serve as the program-embedded owner of the knowledge layer that powers a customer-deployed Generative AI Platform. This role sits at the intersection of knowledge engineering, data governance, and customer-facing enablement.

• Own the health and integrity of the program’s Cortex — governing the knowledge graph, ontology, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and curated content.
• Design, evolve, and maintain the ontology and taxonomy: define entities, relationships, properties, and controlled vocabularies.
• Govern data-lake intake — establish and enforce standards for source onboarding, metadata, classification, tagging, quality gates, and retention.
• Identify and maintain the connections that make the knowledge layer valuable — cross-source linkages, master/reference data alignment, entity resolution, and relationship enrichment.
• Serve as the program’s knowledge manager and librarian — own the business glossary, content findability, citation discipline, and lifecycle of knowledge assets.
• Curate Cortex content: deduplicate, retire stale material, manage manifest accuracy, control ontology drift, and ensure provenance and lineage are captured.
• Provide technical support and coaching to sector personnel who manage data on the ground.
• Act as the trusted advisor on knowledge architecture decisions — assess current state, identify future state, conduct gap analysis, and recommend prioritization.
• Collaborate with the Data Architect and platform engineering team to ensure integration with underlying data architecture.
• Partner with analysts to understand knowledge consumption and continuously improve retrieval relevance.
• Define and enforce knowledge-engineering standards, style guides, and SOPs.
• Drive consensus across business and technical stakeholders on the knowledge architecture vision.
• Provide continuous feedback to platform engineering and product teams on capability gaps.
• Document the knowledge architecture, ontology decisions, intake standards, and curation methodologies.
• Mentor junior knowledge engineers, data curators, and data stewards.
• Support training and onboarding of analysts, engineers, and sector personnel.

Qualifications

• Minimum of a Bachelor’s degree in Information Science, Library & Information Science, Computer Science, Data Science, Knowledge Management, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
• 8–12 years of relevant experience in knowledge engineering, ontology/taxonomy development, knowledge graph curation, data stewardship, or information architecture.
• Demonstrated experience designing and maintaining ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience curating and governing a knowledge graph or comparable structured knowledge asset.
• Demonstrated experience governing data intake into a lake, warehouse, or comparable repository.
• Strong grounding in data stewardship and governance practices.
• Working proficiency in SQL and a scripting language (Python preferred).
• Familiarity with knowledge representation standards and tooling.
• Strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Customer-facing presence and judgment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort operating in fast-paced, evolving environments.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with architects, developers, and analysts.
• US Citizenship with the ability to obtain and maintain required security clearances.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with AI-enabled platforms, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, or AI-assisted curation workflows.
• Experience curating knowledge for LLM consumption.
• Experience with graph databases and graph query languages.
• Experience with metadata management, data catalog, or governance platforms.
• Familiarity with formal knowledge-management frameworks.
• Experience with NLP techniques relevant to knowledge engineering.
• Background in domains beyond intelligence.
• Experience embedding with a customer or program team for an extended period.
• Experience developing ontology style guides, curation SOPs, or training materials.
• Experience evaluating or adopting new knowledge-engineering or AI tooling.
• Mentorship experience — coaching junior knowledge engineers or curators.
• Exposure to Agile delivery and cross-functional team collaboration.

Benefits

• Target Salary Range: $135,000 - $216,000.
• Salary is determined by various factors, including scope and responsibilities, experience, education, and geographic location.
• Employees may be eligible for overtime, shift differential, and a discretionary bonus in addition to base pay.

Company Description

Peraton is a next-generation national security company that drives missions of consequence spanning the globe. As the world’s leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies.