Senior Ontologist, Biologics Discovery

At Johnson & Johnson,we believe health is everything. Our strength in healthcare innovation empowers us to build aworld where complex diseases are prevented, treated, and cured,where treatments are smarter and less invasive, andsolutions are personal.
Through our expertise in Innovative Medicine and MedTech, we are uniquely positioned to innovate across the full spectrum of healthcare solutions today to deliver the breakthroughs of tomorrow, and profoundly impact health for humanity.
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Job Function

Data Analytics & Computational Sciences

Job Sub Function

Data Science

Job Category

Scientific/Technology

All Job Posting Locations

Beerse, Antwerp, Belgium

Job Description

Our expertise in Innovative Medicine is informed and inspired by patients, whose insights fuel our science‑based advancements. Visionaries like you work on teams that save lives by developing the medicines of tomorrow. Join us in developing treatments, finding cures, and pioneering the path from lab to life while championing patients every step of the way. Learn more at https://www.jnj.com/innovative-medicine.

About the Opportunity

Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine is seeking a Senior Ontologist dedicated to our Biologics Discovery organization. This is a horizontal, cross‑cutting role that owns the semantic foundation touching every dataset and every team: how antibody, protein engineering, assay, automation, sequence, external partner, and discovery portfolio data are connected, governed, discovered, and reused. You will be a hands‑on ontologist and cross‑functional catalyst, turning complex scientific language into reusable ontologies, controlled vocabularies, mappings, and semantic standards. This position will be based at one of our office locations in either Spring House, PA (strongly preferred), Titusville, NJ, or Raritan, NJ, USA; Beerse, BE, or Madrid, Spain. (No remote option.) Please note that this role is available across multiple countries and may be posted under different requisition numbers to comply with local requirements. While you are welcome to apply to any or all of the postings, we recommend focusing on the specific country(s) that align with your preferred location(s):

• USA
  - Requisition Number: R-099961
• Spain
  - Requisition Number: R-100659
• Belgium
  - Requisition Number: R-100662

Why this role matters

Biologics data is generated across many systems and teams, often with terminology that differs by source, which limits how well scientists and models can find, compare, and reuse it. This role provides the semantic connective tissue that makes that data computable, interoperable, and AI‑ready across the Discovery portfolio and with CMC partners, aligning to enterprise standards rather than reinventing them, so semantics remain durable as platforms evolve.

Position Summary

As a Senior Ontologist for Biologics Discovery, you will design, build, test, publish, and govern semantic models that enable knowledge graphs, data products, search, analytics, and AI/ML across biologics workflows. You will partner with experimental scientists, computational biologists, data scientists, data engineers, platform teams, and IT to capture domain semantics and translate them into well‑structured ontology modules, and you will set the semantic standards adopted across the team's data products.

A core purpose of this work is to make our data agent‑ready: agentic AI systems cannot reliably navigate, interpret, or act on scientific data without the shared vocabularies, relationships, and constraints that ontologies provide. You will build the semantic layer that lets agents ground their reasoning, retrieve the right data, and connect evidence across experiments, turning fragmented data into knowledge that both scientists and AI can act on. You will align biologics semantics to our enterprise semantic and governance standards, and collaborate with peer ontologists supporting Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls (CMC) in the Therapeutics Development & Supply organization so Discovery and downstream semantics stay aligned across the molecule lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities

• Ontology Design, Release & Standards Model, code, test, and release validated, versioned ontology modules, controlled vocabularies, and mappings across biologics discovery domains, including antibody and protein engineering, assay metadata, molecular design, profiling, automation outputs, sequence/construct knowledge, and developability signals.
• Publish o