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Food Ontology Manager
WISEcodeUnited States, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 11 Nov 2025
About the role
At WISEcode, we are codifying the world’s food system into a transparent, intelligent, and ethical “Code of Food Integrity.” We are a FoodTech + AI company on a mission to help people understand what they should eat and help the industry make food worthy of that understanding.Joining us means shaping the foundation of that mission - turning food into structured knowledge that AI can reason with and consumers can trust. You’ll be part of a tight, high-IQ, low-ego team that values bold ideas, fast iteration, and deep ownership. About the RoleWISEcode is seeking a Food Ontology Manager - a rare, cross-disciplinary thinker who can turn the chaos of the world’s packaged food data into structured, intelligent order. This role sits at the intersection of nutrition science, data modeling, and applied AI. It is both hands-on and architectural: part food scientist, part knowledge engineer, and part startup builder.Our vision is to codify the world’s foods into a living, intelligent system - one that understands ingredients, processing, and nutrition the way Pandora understands music. To do this, we need someone who can design, grow, and maintain WISEcode’s ingredient and food ontology, ensuring every ingredient, attribute, and relationship is modeled with scientific precision and computational elegance.You’ll lead the definition of how foods and ingredients “make sense” inside our platform - designing the taxonomies, tagging frameworks, and inferential logic that power everything from food parsing to scoring to personalization. You’ll collaborate across Data, AI, and Product teams to transform raw text into structured knowledge and subjective nutrition beliefs into measurable, actionable codes.
What You’ll Do● 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.
What You Bring● Hybrid Domain Mastery○ 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.● Analytical and Product Thinking○ 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.● Startup Agility and Leadership Values○ Sense of urgency - moves quickly, learns fast, and iterates with i
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