Knowledge Engineer
US$105 – US$123 / hr base salary
Posted 8 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards (Contract)”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Contract
- Contract
| Base salary | US$105 – US$123 / hr |
|---|
Field of studyBioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics, Systems Biology (or related)
Study levelMaster's or higher
Our Mission
Our mission is to restore cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.
For more information, see our website at altoslabs.com.
Our Value
Our Single Altos Value: Everyone Owns Achieving Our Inspiring Mission.
Diversity at Altos
Altos Labs has been named one of the Top 3 Biotech Companies and ranked for the second year on the Forbes 2026 Best Startups in America list. At Altos, exceptional scientists and industry leaders from around the world work together to advance a shared mission. Our intentional focus is on Belonging, so that all employees know that they are valued for their unique perspectives. We are all accountable for sustaining a diverse and inclusive environment.
What You Will Contribute To Altos
- As a contract Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards, you will drive how our team represents biological knowledge At Altos
- We have built the machinery: a large canonical LinkML/Biolink schema including REST/MCP/CLI service layer; specification packages covering multiple prior-knowledge sources; and an agentic / human-in-the-loop curation framework. What it lacks is a technical owner—someone to govern and administer the content.
- You are the scientific translation layer between biological discovery and AI platform engineering. You will elicit implicit models from bench and computational scientists, encode them rigorously, and utilize the agentic workflows that scale curation beyond what manual review can reach.
- This role carries explicit decision rights: review authority on canonical schema change, ownership of the curation conventions that data atlas and engineering teams follow.
Key Responsibilities
- Knowledge Modeling & Ontology Engineering:
- Design, maintain, and extend internal LinkML / Biolink models and ontologies covering experimental and prior-knowledge metadata—driven by competency questions from user requirements and not by source-side convenience.
- Own mapping and alignment as a discipline: cross-ontology mappings with recorded justification and provenance, and upstream term requests as appropriate.
- Serve as reviewer of record for schema change, holding the line that reuse precedes coining anything new.
- Agentic & Automated Curation:
- Administer, steer, and refine our agentic curation framework and Model Context Protocol (MCP) service layer to scale data profiling, validation, and entity mapping far beyond manual capacity.