Senior Ontologist (Biologics Discovery)

Location: Office-based in Spring House, Pennsylvania; Titusville or Raritan, New Jersey; Beerse, Belgium; or Madrid, Spain. No remote option.

Base pay: $109,000–$174,800 annually for candidates hired in the United States. Candidates hired outside the United States receive local-market compensation and benefits.

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 and construct knowledge, and developability signals.
• Publish API-ready semantic assets for knowledge graphs, data products, search, analytics, and AI/ML workflows.
• Work with biologists, assay scientists, data scientists, engineers, platform teams, and IT to translate scientific concepts into computable semantic models.
• Enable entity linking, classification, normalization, provenance capture, semantic search, and GraphRAG or agentic AI retrieval across biologics datasets.
• Align Discovery semantics with enterprise governance and downstream Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls standards across the molecule lifecycle.

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 ontology versioning, change management, validation, and release workflows.
• 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 scientific communication, cross-functional collaboration, and knowledge of how ontologies and knowledge graphs support AI, semantic search, RAG, or GraphRAG.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive work environment guided by the company’s Credo and focused on patient impact.
• Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability, business accident, and group legal insurance may be available to eligible employees.
• Retirement pension and 401(k) savings plans may be available to eligible employees.
• Time-off benefits include vacation, sick time, holiday pay, and personal and family time.
• Annual performance bonus eligibility applies under the applicable compensation plan.