Ontology Research Engineer

About DoraHacks

DoraHacks is the leading global hackathon community and open source developer incentive platform. DoraHacks provides toolkits for open source technology platforms to organize hackathons and fund early-stage ecosystem startups.

DoraHacks creates a global hacker movement in Blockchain, Web3, Quantum Computing, AI, and Space Tech. So far, more than 21,000 startup teams from the DoraHacks community have received over $80M in funding. A large number of open source communities, companies and blockchain ecosystems are actively using DoraHacks together with its BUIDL AI capabilities for organizing hackathons and funding open source initiatives.

DoraHacks is at the forefront of open-source innovation. Join us to create autonomous open source communities and agentic hackathons with our BUIDL AI initiative.

About the Role
Highly skilled and motivated Ontology Research Engineer to facilitate the development of organizational ontologies that support more robust AI reasoning capabilities. You will play a critical role in bridging domain knowledge with computational logic, enabling systems to better understand, reason, and make decisions within complex organizational environments. You will collaborate with our AI engineering team, and domain experts to design formal representations of concepts, relationships, processes, and roles within organizations. Your work will directly enhance semantic understanding and inferencing in intelligent systems at DoraHacks and/or Dora Factory.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop ontologies representing organizational structures, roles, processes, and governance.

• Translate domain-specific concepts into formal logic models using existing and new frameworks.

• Enable AI systems to perform advanced reasoning, question answering, and decision-making using ontological knowledge.

• Collaborate with our AI team to integrate ontologies with reasoning engines, knowledge graphs, and LLMs.

• Evaluate and refine ontologies through real-world use cases, reasoning tests, and stakeholder feedback.

• Ensure alignment with existing semantic standards and ontologies.

• Contribute to research publications or internal knowledge sharing on ontology development and semantic reasoning.

• Participate in engineering efforts and apply research output to our product suites.

Required Qualifications

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Mathematics, Physics, Foundational Computer Science, Logic, Knowledge Representation, or a related field.

• Strong experience with legacy ontology languages and tools (e.g., OWL, RDF, Protégé, SPARQL).

• Proficiency in formal logic, semantic web standards, and reasoning frameworks.

• Experience building domain ontologies, particularly for organizational or enterprise contexts.

• Understanding of Agentic AI, knowledge representation, and hybrid AI systems (symbolic + sub-symbolic).

• Familiarity with AI reasoning systems (e.g., Description Logics, rule-based systems, inference engines).

• Ability to work across disciplines and communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating ontologies with LLMs or knowledge graphs.

• Familiarity with GraphDB, Stardog, or similar triplestore/graph reasoning platforms.

• Background in philosophy of language, cognitive science, or formal semantics is a plus.

• Contributions to open ontology standards, open source AI repos, or relevant academic publications.

What We Offer

• Opportunity to shape foundational AI reasoning capabilities with high-impact applications.

• Apply ontology research directly to the invention of autonomous organizations.

• A collaborative and intellectually vibrant environment.

• Competitive salary and benefits.

• Career development support, including conference sponsorships and research collaborations.