AI/ML - Ontology Engineer
Date: Mar 12, 2026
Location: Dallas, TX, US, 75251
Company: Nucor
Job Details
Division: Nucor Business Technology
Location: Dallas, TX, United States
Other Available Locations: N/A
Welcome to Nucor, where our unique culture sets us apart. Joining Nucor means becoming part of North America's largest steel and steel products manufacturer, offering unmatched career opportunities and stability. We are known for our innovative sustainability practices and are the continent's largest recycler. Our vibrant culture, built on personal connections and teamwork, empowers every team member with the freedom to innovate and contribute to our collective success. Experience a workplace where safety, efficiency, and meaningful personal connections define every day, enriching both our teammates and the communities we serve.
Nucor supports its teammates with top-tier benefits like Medical, Dental, Vision, and Disability Insurance, 401K and Roth accounts, Profit sharing, Pay-for-performance bonuses, Paid parental leave, Tuition reimbursement, Stock program, Scholarships and more.
Basic Job Functions:
Nucor Business Technology (NBT) is the technology division of Nucor Corporation, North America's largest steel producer and a Fortune 100 company. NBT develops and delivers enterprise technology solutions that enable Nucor's mills and business units to operate safely, efficiently, and competitively. The Ontology Engineer will be a key contributor to NBT's AI & Emerging Technology team, responsible for designing semantic data models, ontologies, and knowledge graphs that serve as the connective tissue between raw operational data and AI-ready intelligence.
Safety is the most important part of all jobs within Nucor; therefore, candidates must be able to demonstrate the ability to initiate, lead, and uphold safety policies, practices, procedures, and housekeeping standards at all times.
Responsibilities include but not limited to:
- Design, build, and maintain enterprise ontologies and knowledge graphs using standards such as OWL, RDF, and SPARQL.
- Collaborate with domain experts, data engineers, and business stakeholders to capture and formalize business concepts, relationships, and rules.
- Develop and manage taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and semantic metadata schemas across Nucor's operational and business domains.
- Integrate ontological structures with enterprise data platforms, AI/ML pipelines, and analytics environments.
- Partner with AI/ML Engineers and data scientists to ensure ontology structures support downstream model training, feature engineering, and inference pipelines.
- Define and enforce data governance standards for entity definitions, lineage tracking, and metadata management across enterprise platforms.
- Monitor ontology performance and usage patterns; proactively identify gaps and drive continuous improvement.
- Support integration of ontology layers with enterprise data products, dashboards, and reporting tools.
- Evaluate and implement ontology management tools and platforms, ensuring scalability and interoperability.
- Translate complex technical concepts into clear documentation for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Stay current with advancements in knowledge representation, semantic web technologies, and AI/ML techniques.
Minimum Qualifications:
- 3+ years of experience in ontology engineering, knowledge graph development, or semantic data modeling.
- Strong proficiency in OWL, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, and related W3C semantic web standards.
- Hands-on experience with ontology development tools such as Protégé, TopBraid Composer, or similar.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to model complex business domains.
- Experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, Azure Cosmos DB for Gremlin) and graph query languages.
- Strong understanding of data governance, metadata management, and master data management (MDM) principles.
- Experience collaborating in cross-functional Agile or DevOps environments.
- Excellent analytical thinking with ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into formal semantic models.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with ability to present technical concepts to diverse audiences.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Master's degree or Ph.D. in Knowledge Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or related discipline.
- Experience in industrial, manufacturing, or supply chain domains with complex operational data.
- Familiarity with SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) for ontology validation and data quality enforcement.
- Knowledge of linked data principles and experience publishing or consuming linked datasets.
- Exposure to ML/AI pipelines and practical experience enhancing them through semantic enrichment.
- Experience with LLM-grounded knowledge graphs or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.
- Familiarity with Nucor's manufacturing metrics (uptime, yield, safety, cost per ton) and their semantic representation.
- Exposure to enterprise data catalogs (e.g., Microsoft Purview, Collibra, or Alation).
- Contributions to open-source ontology projects or published work in semantic web conferences/journals.
Nucor is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a drug-free workplace
Nearest Major Market: Dallas
Nearest Secondary Market: Fort Worth