Ontologist

Ontologist, Workforce Intelligence at ProFinda

ProFinda is a fast-growing, innovative SaaS company revolutionizing how organizations understand, mobilize, and manage their workforce and skills. Our platform uses cutting-edge AI to match people to the right projects and opportunities, enabling unprecedented agility and efficiency for our global client base. We work with some of the world's largest and most complex organizations, and our success is directly tied to the deep, trusted relationships we build with them.

We are seeking a highly analytical and detail-oriented Ontologist to own the intellectual core of our resourcing platform. You will be responsible for evolving and managing the comprehensive ontology that structures our HR data - including skills, job titles, qualifications and more.

Your work will directly power our system's intelligent search, candidate-to-role matching algorithms, and talent analytics. You will be the central expert, ensuring our data is logical, scalable, and accurately reflects the fast-evolving world of work.

Key Responsibilities:

• Ontology Architecture: Design, build, and extend a multi-faceted ontology for the HR domain, including complex relationships between roles, skill sets, and professional qualifications.
• Semantic Modeling: Define rich semantic relationships (e.g., Parent-Child, Canonical-Alternative, Related-To) to support intelligent candidate-to-role matching.
• Curation & Governance: Act as the "Editor-in-Chief" of the ontology. Establish workflows for term requests, perform regular audits, and manage the lifecycle of terms (addition, deprecation, and merging). Ability to define "inclusion/exclusion" criteria for terms to ensure a clean, non-redundant data set.
• Cross-Functional Integration: Collaborate with the Data Science team to use NLP and ML/LLM technologies to improve the ontology, and with Product Owners to ensure the ontology appropriately supports the application's UI/UX.
• Standardization: Map internal vocabularies to global standards, ensuring our system remains interoperable with the broader HR tech ecosystem.
• Data Analysis: Proactively identify and resolve missing concepts (gaps) and ambiguous concepts in the ontology by continuously monitoring both internal and external data sources.
• Stakeholder Communication: Effectively handle stakeholder expectations and requests (e.g., from Product, Sales, and Delivery teams) regarding the ontology's capabilities, data coverage, and roadmap.

What you need to be successful in the role:

• Knowledge of Taxonomy & Ontology Principles: Understanding of facets, hierarchies, semantic relationships and classes/sub-classes.
• Data Modeling: Ability to model complex relationships.
• Querying: Basic to intermediate SQL (for querying databases).
• Data Analysis: Strong skills in Excel, Google Sheets, or other tools for manipulating and analyzing large term lists.
• Precision & Detail: A focus on consistency, logic, and accuracy.
• Conceptual Thinking: The ability to categorize abstract concepts (e.g., "Soft Skills") into a logical structure that a computer can process.
• Communication: The ability to translate complex linguistic or structural decisions into business value for stakeholders and developers.
• Pragmatism: The ability to balance "academic" ontological perfection with the "real-world" performance requirements of a fast-moving software product.
• Rapid and Consistent Decision Making: The ability to make rapid and consistent decisions when performing essential tasks to ensure a high-level of quality.

Education & Experience:

• Academic Background: Bachelor’s or Master’s in a field that emphasizes structured logic or information organization. Examples include Library/Information Science, Linguistics, Computer Science, Philosophy.
• Industry Experience: Equivalent professional experience building and managing taxonomies or ontologies, especially in a SaaS, recruitment, or enterprise data environment, is valued over a specific degree.
• Domain Experience: Experience working with Workforce or Talent data (skills, roles, competencies, qualifications) is a plus.

Our Culture & Values:

At ProFinda, we know that a great culture is something that develops naturally on the back of strong, clearly defined company values and leadership. This culture is what motivates and retains talented employees. Our values are true to ProFinda and are reinforced among our employees daily, translating to a culture that makes the entire team proud.

🚀 Purpose Driven Work – We’re engaged, excited, and focused on making a meaningful impact.

👨‍💻 Transparency & Agility – Great communication, self-driven attitudes, and solution mindsets are at our core.

💓 Trust & Autonomy – We take ownership, work independently, and support each other.

💡 Collaboration & Success – We believe teamwork fuels innovation and shared achievements.

🪴 Continuous Learning & Growth – A dynamic environment where everyone can reach their full potential.

🧘 Work + Life Balance – We value a healthy balance, knowing that well-being and performance go hand in hand.

A bit about us:

Though our backgrounds are diverse, we share a belief - employee skills and a knowledge lens can lead to workforce productivity and quality, also favouring employee personal development and mobility. That common inspiration keeps us aligned with our purpose as a global team. The distance doesn't slow us down. We keep the engine humming from our homes, co-working spaces, and coffee shops. Whether collaborating through Slack, video calls, our team knows how to keep connected - it’s what we do best!  

At ProFinda, inclusivity fits our core values of aspiring to create an open-minded workforce, where our employees feel comfortable to be themselves.  We know that creating diverse teams is the most fundamental component to our success and this success can only be achieved by a collective of people with different backgrounds, experiences, personalities, talents, ideas and opinions.  We hire fantastic, innovative team players – if that sounds like you, you will find a home at ProFinda!