Ontology & Semantic Modeler, Data Context Layer

Job Description

 The Opportunity

• Based in Hyderabad, join a global healthcare biopharma company and be part of a 130- year legacy of success backed by ethical integrity, forward momentum, and an inspiring mission to achieve new milestones in global healthcare. • Be part of an organisation driven by digital technology and data-backed approaches that support a diversified portfolio of prescription medicines, vaccines, and animal health products. • Drive innovation and execution excellence. Be a part of a team with passion for using data, analytics, and insights to drive decision-making, and which creates custom software, allowing us to tackle some of the world's greatest health threats.

Our Technology Centers focus on creating a space where teams can come together to deliver business solutions that save and improve lives. An integral part of our company’s IT operating model, Tech Centers are globally distributed locations where each IT division has employees to enable our digital transformation journey and drive business outcomes. These locations, in addition to the other sites, are essential to supporting our business and strategy.

A focused group of leaders in each Tech Center helps to ensure we can manage and improve each location, from investing in growth, success, and well-being of our people, to making sure colleagues from each IT division feel a sense of belonging to managing critical emergencies. And together, we must leverage the strength of our team to collaborate globally to optimize connections and share best practices across the Tech Centers.

Role Overview

This role is part of a broader enterprise initiative to establish a Data Context Layer (DCL) — a foundational capability designed to provide consistent, reusable, and scalable context across enterprise data products.

The DCL is intended to address challenges related to data fragmentation, lack of shared semantics, and inconsistent interpretation of data across systems and products. It establishes a unified layer for representing context, relationships, and meaning, enabling downstream products to operate with greater consistency, interoperability, and intelligence.

In addition, the DCL plays a critical role in enabling agentic AI capabilities across the enterprise by providing the structured context and semantic grounding required for intelligent agents to operate reliably. This includes ensuring that agent-driven workflows and decisions are based on consistent, governed, and interpretable data context, reducing risks associated with fragmentation, ambiguity, and lack of control.

Within this initiative, we are seeking an Ontology and Semantic Modeler to design, develop, and maintain the semantic foundations of an enterprise platform that enables teams to publish, discover, and consume standardized data context through self-service. This role is responsible for creating and governing ontologies, semantic models, and related standards that make enterprise context consistent, reusable, and machine-readable across systems and AI-enabled workflows.

The ideal candidate has strong experience in ontology engineering, semantic modeling, OWL/RDF, knowledge representation, and metadata-driven design. Familiarity with agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering is required, as the semantic layer will support both human users and AI/agentic consumers of context.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and maintain enterprise ontologies and semantic models that represent key business concepts, entities, relationships, and rules.
• Define modeling standards, conventions, and lifecycle practices for semantic assets across the enterprise.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, engineering, governance, and domain experts to translate business needs into formal semantic structures.
• Ensure semantic models support standardized, self-service serving of data context.
• Develop and maintain OWL/RDF-based models, vocabularies, taxonomies, and controlled terminologies as needed.
• Support mapping and alignment between source systems, canonical models, and context-serving interfaces.
• Help define validation rules, versioning strategies, and governance processes for semantic assets.
• Ensure ontologies are production-ready, reusable, and aligned to platform requirements for discoverability, access, and interoperability.
• Partner with technical teams to support integration with semantic layers, knowledge graphs, MCP, A2A, Protégé and timbr-like technologies where relevant.
• Contribute to the design of context structures that improve AI and agentic system grounding, prompt quality, and context delivery.
• Support testing, documentation, and quality assurance of semantic models before release into production.
• Work with stakeholders to resolve modeling ambiguities and establish shared understanding of enterprise concepts.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in ontology modeling, semantic modeling, information modeling, or knowledge representation.
• Strong knowledge of OWL, RDF, ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and semantic web concepts.
• Experience building semantic models for enterprise data platforms, knowledge graphs, or metadata-driven systems.
• Familiarity with agentic AI, prompt engineering, and context engineering concepts.
• Ability to translate complex business concepts into formal model structures.
• Strong collaboration skills and experience working with domain experts, architects, and engineers.
• Experience defining semantic standards and supporting governance processes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with ontology management tools or semantic platforms such as timbr, protege or similar technologies.
• Familiarity with MCP, A2A, knowledge graphs, semantic layers, or ontology-driven data access.
• Background in enterprise data governance, master data, metadata management, or taxonomy development.
• Experience supporting AI-enabled systems that depend on trusted structured context.
• Familiarity with model validation, version control, lineage, and production release processes.
• Experience working in regulated or complex enterprise environments with multiple domains.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means:

• enterprise ontologies are consistent, governed, and reusable
• semantic models accurately reflect shared business meaning
• context can be served uniformly across systems and use cases
• models are production-ready and easy for teams to consume
• the semantic foundation improves AI, analytics, and application interoperability
• the enterprise has a trusted, scalable context layer

Who we are We are known as Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, we have been bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world's most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.

What we look for Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.

#HYDIT2025

Required Skills:

Business Intelligence (BI), Business Translations, Context Mapping, Contextual Design, Database Administration, Data Engineering, Data Management, Data Modeling, Data Visualization, Design Applications, Enterprise Data, Information Management, Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Representation, Metadata Management, Model Validation, Ontology, SAP Master Data Governance (MDG), Semantic Web, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), System Designs, Taxonomy Development

Preferred Skills:

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Current Contingent Workers apply HERE

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully 
Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company.  No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails. 

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

No Travel Required

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Not Applicable

Shift:

Not Indicated

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

n/a

Job Posting End Date:

07/3/2026

*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.