Knowledge Engineer

Knowledge Engineer - Financial Services - Abu Dhabi (12 month extendable contract)

Contract Details:

• 12-month initial contract with strong potential for extension
• Based in Abu Dhabi, on site (Monday - Friday)
• Visa, Medical Insurance, Flight, Gratuity (only for contractor)

About the Opportunity:

Our client, a leading financial services organisation in Abu Dhabi, is investing heavily in data and AI capabilities and is looking for an experienced Knowledge Engineer to design, build and scale its enterprise knowledge graph. The role will connect fragmented data across the business into a trusted, semantically rich foundation that powers analytics, regulatory and risk use cases, and the next generation of AI applications.

This is a hands-on role for someone who has already delivered enterprise-grade knowledge graphs in a banking or financial services environment and can hit the ground running.

Role Purpose:

To own the design, development and evolution of the organisation's enterprise knowledge graph and ontology layer, ensuring that business knowledge, data assets and relationships are modelled consistently, governed properly and made accessible to downstream consumers, including data science, risk, compliance, operations and AI/GenAI teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and build enterprise-scale knowledge graphs, from conceptual model through to production deployment
• Develop and maintain ontologies, taxonomies and semantic data models aligned to financial services domains (e.g. customers, products, counterparties, transactions, risk, regulatory)
• Engage with business SMEs, data owners and architects to capture domain knowledge and translate it into formal, reusable models
• Integrate data from multiple source systems into the graph, working with data engineering teams on ingestion, entity resolution and data quality
• Define and apply standards for metadata, lineage, governance and ontology change management
• Build and optimise graph queries and APIs to support business use cases such as 360° customer view, relationship and network analysis, financial crime and AML/KYC, risk aggregation and regulatory reporting
• Support the use of the knowledge graph in AI initiatives, including GraphRAG, semantic search and LLM grounding
• Align the graph with industry standards and reference models such as FIBO where appropriate
• Contribute to the architecture roadmap, tooling selection and best practice for knowledge management across the organisation
• Document designs, produce training material and upskill internal teams in knowledge graph and semantic technologies

Essential Experience:

• Proven background in financial services or banking, with a strong understanding of the data, business and regulatory landscape
• Demonstrable track record of designing and delivering enterprise-grade knowledge graphs in production, not proofs of concept alone
• Strong ontology and data modelling skills, with hands-on experience of RDF/OWL and/or labelled property graph approaches
• Experience with at least one enterprise graph platform, such as Neo4j, Stardog, TigerGraph, Amazon Neptune, GraphDB or similar
• Proficiency in graph query languages (SPARQL and/or Cypher/Gremlin)
• Experience integrating large, complex and heterogeneous data sources, including entity resolution and master/reference data concepts
• Solid understanding of data governance, metadata management and data quality in a regulated environment
• Strong stakeholder management and the ability to explain semantic concepts to non-technical business audiences

Desirable Experience:

• Familiarity with FIBO or other financial industry ontologies and standards
• Experience with SHACL/ShEx, semantic validation and ontology lifecycle management
• Exposure to GraphRAG, LLM integration, vector search or NLP-based knowledge extraction
• Programming skills in Python (or similar) and experience with data pipelines and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP)
• Experience supporting AML, KYC, fraud, risk or regulatory reporting use cases using graph technology
• Prior experience working in the GCC / Middle East financial services market
• Relevant degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Data Science or a related discipline

Key Competencies:

• Structured, analytical thinker who can model complex domains clearly
• Pragmatic and delivery-focused, balancing semantic rigour with business value
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and business teams
• Comfortable operating in a large, regulated, fast-moving organisation