JD: Senior Ontologist / Knowledge EngineerLocation: Bangalore (on-site / hybrid) Type: Full-time Level: Senior / Staff Reports to: Founding team

About UsWe are a Bangalore based networking startup building an agentic net-ops system to improve network reliability and reduce time to action for our customers. The founding team has a cumulative 45 years of experience in the networking industry.

Role OverviewAs a Senior Ontologist you will bring the experience of building ontologies to the computer networks and operations field. You will work with the founding team, network specialists and a group of software engineers to apply ontology design and modelling techniques to the agentic NetOps system. You will be responsible for the efficacy of the system and will drive the product evolution.

This is a founding-level technical role. You will not be handed a specification — you will be the person who decides what the knowledge layer of this product looks like, proves it is better than what exists today, and defends that choice with evidence.

What You'll Do· Prove the thesis. Our system runs on a property graph today. Show us — measurably, against a baseline — that a formal ontology improves it.

· Build the MVP. Design and ship the ontology and knowledge graph underneath our agentic netops system, including the interfaces our agents query.

· Model the domain. Devices, interfaces, links, topologies, services, configuration, policy, telemetry, alarms, incidents — and the causal relationships between them.

· Bridge two teams. Turn our network specialists' undocumented operational expertise into formal models our engineers can build against.

· Scale deliberately.



Expand coverage and use-cases in increments through modularization and versioning, without breaking what already works.

· Set the standards. Naming and IRI policy, constraint validation, ontology CI/CD, release process, provenance, and governance.

· Work with customers. Apply ontology engineering directly to their problems, and bring what you learn back into the core model.

What We Are Looking For· 5+ years building and shipping ontologies or formal knowledge models in production systems — not only research artifacts.

· Strong command of semantic web and knowledge representation technology: RDF/RDFS, OWL (and its profiles), SHACL/ShEx, SPARQL, and the reasoning trade-offs between expressivity and tractability.

· Hands-on experience with graph databases and triple stores, and clear-eyed judgment about property graph vs. RDF trade-offs. Comfortable in Cypher/GQL as well as SPARQL.

· A real methodology for ontology development — competency questions, iterative validation, reuse of upper and domain ontologies — and the discipline to apply it under startup time pressure.

· Working knowledge of entity resolution, data integration, and mapping messy operational data into a formal model.

· Python (or equivalent) at the level needed to build pipelines, validators and tooling yourself. You will write code.





· The ability to explain a modelling decision to a network engineer, a backend engineer, and a customer's VP of Infrastructure in three different ways.

Nice to Have· Familiarity with networking data and information models: YANG, OpenConfig, IETF network topology models, SNMP MIBs, NETCONF/gNMI, TM Forum SID, alarm/fault models.

· Experience combining knowledge graphs with LLMs or agentic systems — GraphRAG, natural-language-to-query, grounding, tool interfaces for agents, evaluation harnesses.

· Experience with upper ontologies (BFO, DOLCE), SKOS, PROV-O, or ontology tooling such as Protégé, LinkML, ROBOT, or Widoco.

· Prior work in a standards body or open ontology community.

· Experience being the first person in a role, at a startup, without a playbook.

Why This Role Is InterestingOntology engineering roles are usually maintenance work on a model someone else designed, in a domain where the answer is already known. This is neither. Computer networks are one of the few domains where formal semantics genuinely earn their keep — the entities are well-defined, the relationships are causal, the volume of operational data is enormous, and the cost of a wrong answer at 3 AM is real.

You will be doing original modelling work on a hard domain, with direct feedback from production systems and the people who operate them.

What We Offer· Competitive compensation.

· Direct ownership of a core technical pillar of the product, with founder-level access and no layers between you and the decisions.

· A team with deep networking expertise that will teach you the domain as quick as you can teach them the modelling.

📌 Senior Ontologist / Knowledge Engineer (Karnataka)
🏢 LinkEye
📍 Karnataka