Lead Ontologist — Pharma R&D;

Location:
India

Level:
Lead / Principal (senior individual contributor with robust influence)

Mandatory Skills :
RDF, RDFS, OWL

About the Role

Tech Mahindra is hiring a
Lead Ontologist
to drive the semantic and knowledge-graph foundations underpinning Pharma R&D;'s FAIR data and AI strategy. This is a hands-on
leadership
role: you'll set the ontology vision, define standards, mentor others, and partner directly with R&D; scientists, data engineers, and AI/ML teams to make research and CMC/Labs data interoperable, machine-readable, and AI-ready.

You won't just build ontologies — you'll
drive
the semantic roadmap, influence enterprise architecture decisions, and embed semantic best practice across teams.

What You'll Do
- Own and drive the
ontology and knowledge-graph strategy
across R&D; - CMC & Labs domains.
- Design, govern, and evolve ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies using W3C standards.
- Lead integration of
LIMS, ELN, CDS, and instrument data
into FAIR knowledge graphs.
- Set semantic standards, governance,



and versioning; mentor engineers and junior data/semantic practitioners.
- Enable AI/ML and
GraphRAG / LLM-plus-knowledge-graph
use cases with ontology-backed context.
- Represent client in industry consortia (Allotrope, Pistoia Alliance) and influence external standards.

Mandatory Skills & Experience
- ~10+ years overall in data / information / knowledge engineering
, of which
4+ years hands-on building and governing ontologies, taxonomies, or knowledge graphs
(we value depth and impact over title longevity).
- Demonstrated Lead/Principal-level ownership
— driving a semantic, knowledge-graph, or enterprise data-modelling initiative end-to-end, including stakeholder influence and mentoring.
- Strong command of semantic-web standards:
RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL
.
- Hands-on ontology development with
Protégé
(or TopBraid / equivalent).
- Practical experience with a
triplestore / graph database
(Stardo

📌 Lead Ontologist (Hyderabad)
🏢 Tech Mahindra
📍 Hyderabad