Senior Ontologist (Biologics)

Location: Office-based with no remote option; Spring House, Titusville, or Raritan in the USA, Beerse in Belgium, or Madrid in Spain. Spring House is strongly preferred.

Base pay: €72,500–€115,230 annually.

Company

Johnson & Johnson develops healthcare, Innovative Medicine, and MedTech solutions focused on preventing, treating, and curing complex diseases.

What you will do

• Design, code, test, version, release, and govern ontology modules, controlled vocabularies, mappings, and semantic standards for biologics discovery.
• Model antibody and protein engineering, assay metadata, molecular design, automation outputs, sequence knowledge, and developability signals using OWL/RDF, SKOS, and SHACL.
• Publish API-ready semantic assets for knowledge graphs, data products, search, analytics, and AI/ML workflows.
• Integrate semantic layers into data pipelines, catalogs, and graph platforms while enabling entity linking, normalization, provenance, and semantic search.
• Build SPARQL queries and automated validation for semantic coverage, conformance, lineage, and completeness.
• Align Discovery semantics with enterprise governance and downstream CMC models through collaboration with scientists, engineers, data teams, IT, and peer ontologists.

Requirements

• Advanced degree in Biomedical Informatics, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Data Science, Computer Science, or a related field.
• At least 3 years of experience in ontology engineering, knowledge modeling, taxonomy design, semantic standards, or knowledge graph development.
• Hands-on experience with versioning, change management, validation, and release workflows for ontology assets.
• Proficiency with OWL, RDF(S), SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL, and ontology design patterns.
• Experience with graph and semantic technologies such as Neo4j, GraphDB, Amazon Neptune, Stardog, Protégé, or RDF triple stores.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including the ability to translate scientific discussions into semantic models and delivery plans.

Nice to have

• Experience in biologics, antibody design, protein engineering, assay biology, or high-throughput experimentation.
• Experience in governed pharma or biotech environments, FAIR data principles, and research-to-development interoperability.
• Experience integrating ontology assets into data pipelines, knowledge graphs, search, agentic AI, or GraphRAG tools.
• Familiarity with OBO Foundry ontologies, UMLS, GO, ChEBI, UniProt, HL7/FHIR, or CDISC.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-functional work with experimental scientists, computational biologists, data scientists, data engineers, platform teams, and IT.
• Annual bonus with a target based on pay grade and location.
• Vacation, parental leave of at least 12 weeks, bereavement leave, caregiver leave, and volunteer leave.
• Well-being reimbursement and financial, physical, and mental health programs.
• Insurance plans and service anniversary and recognition awards, subject to plan and location terms.