Lead Ontologist — Pharma R&D;
Location: India
Level: Lead / Principal (senior individual contributor with strong 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.
Solid 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 (Stardog, GraphDB, AWS Neptune, or Ne

📌 Lead Ontologist (Hyderabad)
🏢 Tech Mahindra
📍 Hyderabad