Work Schedule
Standard (Mon-Fri)Environmental Conditions
OfficeJob 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%
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Life Sciences, Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Information Science, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related scientific or technical field.
- 5+ years of experience developing or managing ontologies, semantic data models, taxonomies, knowledge graphs, or information architecture.
- Expertise in ontology engineering, knowledge representation, semantic modeling, and knowledge graph design.
- Experience with OWL, RDF, and SKOS standards.
- 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, and ontology management tools.
- Understanding of 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.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills with scientific, technical, and non-technical stakeholders.
- Master's degree in a relevant field.
- Experience with scientific or biomedical knowledge models and AI/search applications.
- Experience with Neo4j and PostgreSQL.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Thermo Fisher Scientific and has not been reviewed or approved by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
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Retirement Support — Retirement programs include a strong company 401(k) match and an employee stock purchase plan that add meaningful long‑term value. Feedback suggests these features stand out among core financial benefits even when base pay feels average.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage offers multiple national medical options alongside dental and vision, with company‑paid life and disability coverage. This breadth is considered a solid foundation even if some costs may not be the lowest among peers.
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Parental & Family Support — Paid parental and caregiver leave, backup care, adoption assistance, and specialized family resources are available. Feedback suggests these supports are a notable plus for colleagues managing family and caregiving needs.
Thermo Fisher Scientific Insights
What We Do
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is the world leader in serving science, with annual revenue of approximately $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.
Why Work With Us
You will join a company which every colleague has the opportunity to create possibilities, for oneself, for our customers and patients. There is no more exciting place to be than at the forefront of solving problems which help improve lives around the world. As a company, we are committed to supporting your career aspirations and your journey.
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