Senior Ontologist

Join the A.I. company tackling some of the most consequential problems facing the world today. Gro Intelligence is a fast-growing, mission-driven data and analytics company dedicated to understanding the interconnected global markets for all agricultural products. From the food we eat to the clothing we wear and the gasoline in millions of cars across the globe, agriculture touches our daily existence like few other industries.  And it’s being completely upended by climate change, trade wars, finite global resources, fickle public policies, a growing population and ever-changing human tastes (e.g. organic produce, plant-based proteins, etc).  Come help us understand the complex interplay of these various forces and their ripple effect on global markets. 

With offices in both New York and Nairobi, and the financial backing of prominent investors including TPG Growth and Data Collective, Gro is a diverse team of more than 70 technologists, scientists, and business professionals.  Our team is growing rapidly and we’re looking for highly motivated, intellectually curious individuals with a shared commitment to building software that impacts the world on the most basic level. 

Gro has been featured prominently alongside the company’s founder and CEO in several recent outlets including Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Fast Company’s Most Creative People, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in Business, and Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive with Nick Bilton.  

What You'll Do: 

• Fluently translate natural language and business jargon into precise, complex knowledge representations

• Synthesize and arbitrate disparate views of a knowledge domain

• Design and deploy ontologies, models and other structures to identify and fill knowledge gaps in the representation of entities, relations and processes related to agriculture

• Assist in developing tooling to support capture of domain concepts and to allow model/ontology extension by subject matter experts

• Support technology team as they integrate heterogeneous unstructured, semi-structured, and well-structured data into a master repository

• Work with subject matter experts to develop graph-based semantic models which capture knowledge about diverse real-world scenarios

What You Have: 

• BA or BS in Library Science, Information Science, Computer Science or a related field

• 6+ years of experience in data governance, ontology and taxonomy development

• Master's Degree strongly preferred

• Experience with Basic Formal Ontology or another upper-level ontology

• Proficiency with RDF, OWL, SPARQL or similar technologies

• Experience presenting complex topics in a concise way to executive management

Bonus Points:

• Experience with triple stores and graph stores

• Proficiency in data analysis, semantic modeling, knowledge and ontology engineering

• Strong logical and conceptual reasoning, strong attention to detail

• Experience in scripting, preferably using Python

• Experience using ontologies to support data integration

Gro Intelligence is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender identity or expression, veteran status, actual or presumed belonging to an ethnic group, or any other legally protected status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.