Senior Ontology Engineer

TSC is seeking a Senior Ontology Engineer in King George/Dahlgren, Virginia. This position supports the Systems Engineering & Analysis Division (SEA).

*Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance.

TSC offers a professional working environment, a competitive salary, and an excellent benefits package.  Come and join our team!

We are seeking a Senior Ontology Engineer to design, develop, and maintain ontological frameworks and knowledge graph solutions in support of defense mission engineering programs. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in formal ontology and semantic web technologies with hands-on experience in data integration, graph database systems, large language models, and knowledge-driven data architecture development. This individual will translate complex, multi-domain mission requirements into scalable knowledge representations and work alongside software engineers, systems engineers, and domain experts to deliver end-to-end solutions. The ideal candidate has experience in technical writing and will work alongside the business development team to propose innovative solutions to address requests for proposals.

Responsibilities:

This position is designed to be flexible, with responsibilities evolving to meet program needs, emerging technology trends, and opportunities for individual professional growth.

This position requires a technically deep and mission-focused individual with expertise in knowledge engineering, ontology development, and artificial intelligence technologies applied to defense and mission engineering domains.

•    Design, develop, and maintain formal ontologies using OWL, RDF/RDFS, and SPARQL aligned with DoD mission engineering requirements and semantic interoperability standards.
•    Build and deploy knowledge graph solutions that integrate structured and unstructured data sources across heterogeneous, multi-domain defense systems.
•    Apply and extend upper-level ontology frameworks, ensuring alignment with DoD and IC data standards.
•    Design and implement graph-based AI and semantic solutions, including LLM-integrated pipelines, RAG architectures, and agentic workflows that leverage knowledge graph representations.
•    Collaborate with engineers, systems architects, and mission-domain SMEs to translate operational requirements into actionable ontological models and knowledge architectures.
•    Support semantic integration and data interoperability efforts across legacy and modern system architectures, including graph database deployments (e.g., Stardog, Neptune, Neo4j).
•    Lead the development and writing of technical approaches for proposals related to supporting the Navy adopt AI technologies

Required Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or a related discipline; equivalent experience considered

• PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience, MA/MS with 5+ years of relevant experience, or BA/BS with 7+ years

  • Hands-on experience with knowledge graph technologies including RDF, SPARQL, SHACL, and OWL for DoD or enterprise use cases

  • Experience with schema design, ontology management, and knowledge graph curation

  • Experience designing and developing end-to-end knowledge graph and AI data pipelines, including integration with LLMs or similar models

  • Familiarity with graph database platforms such as Stardog, Blazegraph, Neo4j, or Amazon Neptune

• Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with U.S. Navy Combat Systems

• 2+ years of hands-on Python experience, including frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, rdflib, or owlready2, and ETL pipeline tools (e.g., Apache NiFi, Airflow)

• Experience with full-stack web development, including REST API design and development (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, or Node.js), front-end frameworks (e.g., React or Angular), and containerization/deployment tooling (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)

• Practical experience with NLP, semantic search, prompt engineering, and LLMs for enterprise-scale knowledge graph applications including RAG architectures.

• Experience with agentic AI systems and multi-modal model integration applied to knowledge engineering problems

• Demonstrated team leadership experience, with the ability to guide junior engineers and collaborate across engineering, research, and program management teams

• PhD in Computer Science, Knowledge Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or a publication record in semantic web and knowledge representation

U.S. Citizenship Required for this Position:  Yes

Job Type:  Regular

Security Clearance: Secret (ability to obtain required)

Schedule: Full time (40 hr/week)

Travel:  0-10%

TSC Benefits:

TSC offers a stable work environment, a competitive salary, and a comprehensive benefit package; including ESOP participation, 401k Plan, Flexible Work Schedules, Tuition Reimbursement, Co-Sponsored Health Plan, Paid Leave and much more. 

Applying to TSC:

Only those candidates invited for an interview will be contacted. Employment at TSC is contingent upon the successful completion of a comprehensive background check, security investigation, and a drug screening.

This contractor and subcontractor shall abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60–1.4(a), 60–300.5(a) and 60–741.5(a). These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or for inquiring about, discussing, or disclosing information about compensation. Moreover, these regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.