Senior Ontologist, Biologics Discovery

About the role

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is looking for a Senior Ontologist for its Biologics Discovery organization. This is a horizontal, cross-cutting role that owns the semantic foundation connecting antibody, protein engineering, assay, automation, sequence, partner and portfolio data. It turns complex scientific language into reusable ontologies, controlled vocabularies, mappings and semantic standards. The position is based in Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium (also listed under the same requisition as Spring House, Titusville or Raritan, NJ, and Madrid, Spain), with no remote option.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, test, publish and govern semantic models that support knowledge graphs, data products, search, analytics and AI/ML across biologics workflows.
• Model biologics discovery domains such as antibody and protein engineering, assay metadata, molecular design, profiling, automation outputs, sequences and developability signals, and release versioned ontology modules, controlled vocabularies and mappings.
• Express scientific concepts as OWL/RDF classes and properties, SKOS vocabularies and SHACL constraints, and publish ontology packages as API-ready assets for knowledge graphs and AI/ML workflows.
• Partner with biologists, assay scientists, automation teams and data teams to turn scientific concepts into computable semantic models.
• Work with data engineers to embed semantic layers in data pipelines, catalogs and knowledge graph platforms, and enable entity linking, classification, normalization, provenance capture and semantic search.
• Build and maintain semantic queries (e.g. SPARQL) and automated validation of coverage, conformance, lineage and completeness.
• Align with enterprise data governance and knowledge graph standards, and harmonize terminology with peer ontologists supporting CMC downstream development.

Required profile

• Knowledge of biologics discovery and ability to discuss the science fluently with experimental teams.
• Able to design rigorous semantic models with technical peers and translate complex biology into machine-readable formats.
• Ability to represent Discovery's needs credibly with enterprise and development partners and advocate for reusable data governance.