Enterprise Ontologist

Work Schedule

Standard (Mon-Fri)

Environmental Conditions

Office

Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

Description
Join our collaborative team as an Enterprise Ontologist and design, develop, and govern the semantic models that power Thermo Fisher's Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG) and AI-driven digital experiences. This role translates complex scientific and business domains into scalable knowledge structures that improve search, content discovery, data interoperability, and AI performance.

Working across scientific, Content, Product, AI, Data Science, and Engineering teams, the Enterprise Ontologist will serve as a key steward of the knowledge foundation supporting thermofisher.ai and the Foundry, ensuring enterprise ontologies remain accurate, governed, scalable, and aligned with evolving scientific and business needs.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and govern enterprise ontologies and semantic models supporting the EKG and enterprise AI applications.
• Model scientific, product, and operational concepts and relationships using enterprise taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and authoritative external ontologies.
• Partner with scientific SMEs and business and technical teams to translate complex requirements into scalable semantic models.
• Establish ontology governance, including standards, quality assurance, lifecycle management, versioning, provenance, and change management.
• Develop mappings across taxonomies, external ontologies, enterprise data sources, and knowledge graph entities.
• Enable and optimize AI capabilities including semantic search, content classification, RAG, knowledge grounding, and recommendation systems.
• Evaluate ontology effectiveness and identify opportunities to improve retrieval, content quality, knowledge coverage, and AI performance.
• Provide ontology guidance and training to scientific, content, business, and technical stakeholders.

Minimum Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences, Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Information Science, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific or technical field. Master's degree preferred.
• 5+ years of experience developing or managing ontologies, semantic data models, taxonomies, knowledge graphs, or information architecture. Experience with scientific or biomedical knowledge models and AI/search applications strongly preferred.

Required Knowledge or Experience

• Expertise in ontology engineering, knowledge representation, semantic modeling, and knowledge graph design, including standards such as OWL, RDF, and SKOS.
• Strong scientific literacy and knowledge of life-science terminology, concepts, techniques, applications, and experimental workflows.
• Ability to translate complex scientific and technical information into scalable semantic models and knowledge structures.
• Familiarity with scientific ontologies, controlled vocabularies, semantic technologies, graph databases (neo4j and PostgresSQL preferred), and ontology management tools.
• Understanding of AI and search technologies, including semantic search, RAG, NLP, knowledge grounding, and LLM-based applications.
• Proven ability to establish ontology governance, quality, lifecycle, and data stewardship practices.
• Strong analytical and systems-thinking skills with the ability to navigate complex scientific and enterprise knowledge domains.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with scientific SMEs and technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Travel: 10-25%
  

Welcome

Thank you for your interest as you consider starting a new career journey with us. As the world leader in serving science, our colleagues develop critical solutions through innovation—and build rewarding careers. Discover their extraordinary stories and connection to our Mission to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. Their work is a story of purpose. What story will you tell?

About Us

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with annual revenue of more than $40 billion. Our Mission is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. Whether our customers are accelerating life sciences research, solving complex analytical challenges, increasing productivity in their laboratories, improving patient health through diagnostics or the development and manufacture of life-changing therapies, we are here to support them. Our global team delivers an unrivaled combination of innovative technologies, purchasing convenience and pharmaceutical services through our industry-leading brands, including Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, Unity Lab Services, Patheon and PPD.

Accessibility/Disability Access

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

EEO

Thermo Fisher Scientific is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, religion, color, national or ethnic origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, genetic information, veteran status, age or disability status.