WISEcode · 2 months ago
Food Ontology Manager
United States
Full-time
Remote
Mid, Senior LevelWISEcode is a FoodTech + AI company on a mission to codify the world’s food system into a transparent, intelligent, and ethical 'Code of Food Integrity.' The Food Ontology Manager will play a crucial role in designing and maintaining the ingredient and food ontology, ensuring scientific precision and computational elegance in food data management.
AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Information Technology
Responsibilities
Architect the Food Ontology
Design and own WISEcode’s ontology of ingredients, attributes, and relationships - the knowledge backbone that drives food parsing, classification, and scoring
Define canonical concepts, synonym mappings, and attribute hierarchies (e.g., 'sweetener' + 'artificial' = 'artificial sweetener')
Build systems of inference where meaning can be derived, not just tagged
Curate and Expand Ingredient Intelligence
Validate and refine NLP-parsed ingredient lists to ensure fidelity and semantic precision
Identify missing entities, attributes, and relationships - proactively closing data gaps
Collaborate with AI engineers to improve model training data and tagging accuracy
Operationalize Ontology Health
Establish and monitor ontology quality KPIs: coverage, accuracy, resolution rates, and synonym recall
Build tools and processes for continuous ontology enrichment - turning human expertise and AI suggestions into structured knowledge
Drive initiatives to increase the depth and breadth of our food universe
Fuse Human Insight with AI Power
Harness generative and predictive AI tools to accelerate ontology creation, tagging, and validation
Develop prompt libraries, model evaluation frameworks, and active learning loops to scale your impact 10×
Treat AI not as an assistant but as an amplifier - extending your reach, precision, and creativity
Collaborate Across Disciplines
Partner closely with Data Engineering, AI/NLP, and Product teams to ensure ontology changes integrate cleanly into our pipelines and end-user experiences
Serve as the internal thought leader on 'what food means' in data form - translating scientific, semantic, and consumer contexts into actionable structures
Qualification
Required
Deep understanding of food ingredients, additives, and nutrition concepts - whether through formal study or obsessive self-education
Proven experience in ontology, taxonomy, or knowledge graph design (in food, life sciences, or other data-rich domains)
Comfort with SQL or graph-structured data (e.g., PostgreSQL, Neo4j) and basic data modeling principles
Strong systems thinking - able to model the world's messy realities into data structures that support reasoning, analysis, and product experiences
Curiosity for how ontology decisions affect user outcomes, from app filters to nutritional recommendations
Sense of urgency - moves quickly, learns fast, and iterates with intention
Ownership and accountability - treats ontology health like product uptime
Bias for action and clarity - balances depth with pragmatism
Get-Stuff-Done mentality - willing to annotate, tag, and fix things directly while architecting the system that will automate them tomorrow
Collaborative humility - open to feedback, driven by truth over ego
Experience (or appetite) for working with large language models, embedding systems, or semantic AI to enrich and reason over data
Creative curiosity for prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, and tool-assisted data curation
A mindset that sees AI as a teammate - not a threat - and knows how to harness it to multiply personal and organizational output
Company
WISEcode
WISEcode specializes in cutting-edge artificial intelligence and lab testing for precision nutrition data.
Founded in 2021
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
WISEcode has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2024 (2)
2023 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageLeadership Team
Tolga Erdogus
CTO
Brian McDermott
Chief Brand Officer
Recent News
Business Wire
2025-11-19
FoodHack Weekly
2025-06-28
Company data provided by crunchbase