Product Ontology Designer

Job Description

Overview

GEP is a global leader in procurement and supply chain transformation. We help enterprises harness the power of AI and digital technology to stay ahead in the new economy. Through AI-driven solutions, we enable businesses to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness, gain a competitive advantage, and maximize business and shareholder value.

We partner with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises across industries to build high-performing, resilient and sustainable supply chains.

We’re always looking for talented people who can help us grow, continually improve and make a difference. At GEP, we’re building a beautiful company, enjoying the journey and creating lasting impact for our clients, our communities and one another.

What You Will Do

We're building GEP's Distributed Intelligent Data Layer, a semantic platform for procurement running on custom technical stack.

We're looking for a Product Ontology Designer who will define the product and procurement ontology that everything else is built on: the classes, relationships, taxonomies and rules that model products, categories, suppliers and spend.

You'll translate procurement domain knowledge into rigorous RDF/OWL models, validate them against both query surfaces (SPARQL and Cypher), align them to industry standards, and set the governance that keeps the ontology consistent as it scales across tenants.

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• Design the product/procurement ontology: Model classes, properties, relationships and taxonomies for products, categories, suppliers and spend using RDF, OWL and SKOS.
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• Author validation & inference rules: Define SHACL constraints and reasoning rules that keep data correct and enable inference (later materialized via OWL-RL).
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• Align to standards: Map and reconcile against procurement standards and client schemes (UNSPSC, eClass, GS1), resolving overlaps and gaps.
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• Ground the model in real data: Partner with domain SMEs and data engineers to validate the ontology against real catalog and spend data and query patterns, on both SPARQL and Cypher.
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• Own governance: Establish versioning, change control, naming conventions and documentation so the ontology stays coherent as it grows.
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• Enable the annotators: Write and maintain the data-cleaning and annotation guidelines that annotators apply when mapping records and relationships to the ontology, and adjudicate the hard classification cases.
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What You Should Bring

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• Education: Degree in Computer Science, Information/Library Science, Linguistics, or a related field (advanced degree a plus).
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• Experience: 3+ years building ontologies, taxonomies or knowledge models in production, ideally over product, catalog or master data. Equivalent domains are welcome; we care about the modeling skill.
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• Ontology and taxonomy modeling skills: RDF, OWL and SKOS.
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• Constraints and reasoning skills: SHACL, and familiarity with rule-based inference (OWL-RL / SWRL).
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• Ontology tooling skills: Protégé, TopBraid, PoolParty or comparable.
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• SPARQL (and ideally Cypher/openCypher) for validating and querying models against real data.
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• Domain grounding in procurement, product catalog, spend classification or master data, or the ability to ramp on it quickly.
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• Mindset: Rigor, conceptual clarity, and a drive to build a model that stays clean under real-world messiness.
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• Collaboration: Strong communication skills and comfort translating between domain SMEs and engineers in a hybrid, agile team.
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Nice to have (any of these makes you stand out):

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• Procurement / product standards: UNSPSC, eClass, GS1.
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• Entity resolution and data-quality practices.
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• Working with Oxigraph, Apache AGE, or comparable triple stores (Apache Jena, GraphDB) directly.
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• Defining data-cleaning / annotation guidelines and working with data curators.
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This is a hybrid role with 3 days on-site in GEP’s Clark, NJ Headquarters.

Salary Range: $125,000 – $170,000 annually, based on experience and qualifications.

Additional Compensation: Eligible for a performance-based bonus tied to individual and company performance.

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) with a 3% company match, paid time off, company holidays, and professional development opportunities.