About this opportunity
The Senior Data Scientist will develop and maintain ontologies, manage knowledge representation and implement best practices in semantic web technologies and metadata architecture. The role involves improving and organizing data relationships, taxonomy structures, and unifying enterprise data into machine‑interpretable knowledge assets for AI pipelines, analytics platforms, reasoning systems, and knowledge‑driven applications. Collaboration with domain experts and cross‑functional teams is essential to align ontology engineering with business goals.
Responsibilities
Apply data science concepts such as data quality, biases, lineage, and observability to ontology and metadata design to improve AI reliability and analytical accuracy.
Design, develop, and maintain ontologies and semantic data models that support advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI‑driven use cases.
Collaborate with data scientists, AI engineers, and analytics teams to ensure semantic models align with feature engineering, model training, RAG/KAG pipelines and data validation needs.
Distinguish between policy‑based organisational boundaries and legally mandated legislative constraints and advise on the appropriate level of semantic enforcement.
Enable knowledge‑driven AI systems by integrating ontologies with vector embeddings, graph analytics and statistical models where appropriate.
Support data exploration and insight generation by structuring relationships, entities and attributes to enhance explainability and downstream analysis.
Establish and evolve enterprise‑wide semantic governance to keep ontologies scalable, versioned, testable and aligned with analytics and AI lifecycle management.
Define and enforce ontology authoring standards including naming conventions, annotation properties, term lifecycle management, deprecation policies and change‑control processes.
Lead ontology alignment and mapping exercises, including cross‑domain reconciliation, equivalence mapping and integration with industry‑standard models such as TM Forum SID, ETSI, ITU‑T where applicable.
Your Experience
5+ years of experience in ontology design and modelling, NLP, semantic search & retrieval, and knowledge management focused on AI‑augmented knowledge engineering.
Strong grounding in data science concepts: data modelling, data quality assessment, feature engineering and analytical reasoning.
Demonstrated competence with data modelling, classification systems and data relationships; experience modelling network entities, devices and topology is an advantage.
Experience with Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) and ability to design modular, extensible ontologies at scale with enterprise‑wide governance.
Experience with graph technologies such as graph databases, reasoning engines, indexing, versioning, software development lifecycle and CI/CD for semantic assets.
Advocate how generative AI and machine learning can complement ontology design and improve AI reliability, explainability and control.
Strong understanding of metadata standards and taxonomy development, including roles, change‑control processes, term lifecycle, naming conventions and reference data management.
Analytical thinking skills and ability to solve complex problems using structured approaches.
Proven ability to work independently in a hybrid environment, proactively collaborating with stakeholders to define formal semantics and build consensus across functions.
Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Information Science, Statistics or a related field; equivalent professional experience will be considered.
Experience in telecoms or large‑scale enterprise is a plus.
What We Offer
Work‑life balance with flexible hours, maternity/paternity and parental leave.
25 days annual leave plus 2 company days.
Multifaceted sports and social club with activities such as golf, football, swimming, tennis, gaming, theatre and movie nights.
Collaboration in a multicultural environment with colleagues worldwide.
Clearly defined career paths supported by in‑house training and financial support for external study.
Opportunity to travel worldwide and work directly with customers.
Pension scheme, health insurance, company doctor, life cover and sick pay/income continuance plan.
Tax‑saver commuter/bike to work scheme.
Location
Hybrid position (3 days per week on site) based at the Ireland Athlone Office.
Primary country and city: Ireland (IE) – Athlone.
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