About the Role

Establish and lead a global ontology and semantic data strategy for the Digital Energy software organization. This role defines how products, systems, devices, points, relationships, behaviors, and operational concepts are represented consistently across the portfolio.

This is not a purely theoretical or governance-focused position. The successful candidate will combine deep semantic-technology expertise with the practical engineering ability to build and apply ontologies in real software products.

What You Will Do

• Establish and lead the global ontology and semantic data strategy for DE Software.
• Define a common approach to semantic modeling, entity relationships, metadata, classifications, and data tagging.
• Develop practical ontologies for buildings, energy management, automation systems, and related domains.
• Apply RDF, RDFS, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, JSON-LD, and knowledge graphs where appropriate.
• Establish processes for ontology development, versioning, validation, extension, and governance.
• Create reusable semantic models that can be adopted across multiple products and engineering teams.
• Translate operational concepts into machine-understandable models with product architects, software teams, data teams, AI teams, and domain experts.
• Identify opportunities to use semantic models to improve interoperability, analytics, search, engineering efficiency, and AI capabilities.
• Partner with the applied AI team to provide structured domain knowledge, grounding, and contextual relationships.
• Develop reference implementations and working prototypes that demonstrate business and technical value.
• Evaluate existing industry ontologies, taxonomies, schemas, and standards before creating proprietary extensions.
• Build a global community of practice around ontology and semantic data.

What Will Help You Succeed

• Significant professional experience with ontology engineering, semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, or closely related disciplines.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing semantic models in production or product-oriented environments.
• Strong understanding of RDF, OWL, semantic relationships, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and data classification.
• Experience with data tagging, metadata management, entity modeling, and semantic validation.
• Ability to explain what an ontology is, why it matters, and how it creates value for software products and customers.
• Strong software, data engineering, or technical architecture background.
• Demonstrated ability to influence multiple product and engineering organizations without relying solely on direct authority.
• Excellent written, verbal, and visual communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in smart buildings, building management systems, industrial automation, energy management, IoT, or digital twins.
• Experience with Brick Schema, Project Haystack, RealEstateCore, SAREF, BOT, or other relevant industry models.
• Experience integrating semantic models with operational databases, event systems, APIs, analytics platforms, or AI applications.
• Experience applying knowledge graphs or ontologies to retrieval-augmented generation, AI grounding, reasoning, or agent-based systems.
• Experience leading an enterprise-wide semantic architecture or ontology program.
• Familiarity with graph databases and semantic stores.

Leadership Profile

• Highly articulate and able to create clarity from complex concepts.
• Pragmatic rather than dogmatic.
• Comfortable defining a long-term strategy while delivering near-term results.
• A recognized expert who continues to work directly with technology.
• Collaborative across product, architecture, engineering, and business teams.
• Capable of becoming the trusted global authority for ontology within DE Software.

What Success Looks Like

• Publish and align a DE Software ontology strategy.
• Deliver an initial shared semantic model for a priority domain.
• Create an ontology governance and versioning process.
• Achieve adoption by one or more product or platform teams.
• Demonstrate measurable value through an AI, interoperability, engineering, or analytics use case.
• Establish a global ontology community of practice.

Working in the DE Software CTO Office

You will join a highly collaborative, global environment focused on turning emerging technologies into practical software capabilities. These positions require hands-on contributors who can create working implementations, validate ideas through engineering, and partner effectively across product, architecture, domain, and development teams. 

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