Product Owner - Ontology

Own Pennymac’s enterprise ontology product that defines core entities once and reuses them across origination, servicing, and enterprise AI workflows.

Responsibilities

• Define and champion enterprise ontology product vision, strategy, and roadmap.
• Own the end-to-end product lifecycle: ideation, requirements, prioritization, development, launch, and iteration.
• Ensure product decisions align with broader strategic initiatives, including revenue opportunities and cost-saving measures identified by product and business leadership.
• Share product strategy, progress, and outcomes with senior management and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Own and prioritize the ontology change backlog; establish and run ontology governance with change review and approval, impact assessment, and a stewardship model with named owners per domain.
• Partner with data engineering on ontology hydration: map source systems to object types and confirm pipelines keep the model current.
• Define competency questions and validation tests for each domain model to confirm the model answers business questions before release.
• Define adoption and quality metrics, including reuse across workflows, duplicate or orphaned entity rates, definition coverage, mapping freshness, and time from change request to merged model change.
• Own the semantic grounding layer for AI and agentic use cases so agents and LLM-backed workflows reason over governed objects with inherited permissions, lineage, and audit trails rather than raw, ungoverned data.
• Collaborate with business units, technology teams, and executive leadership to gather insights, align priorities, and support product success.
• Translate business needs into goals, user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional requirements using use cases, process flows, and data analysis.
• Act as a business domain expert: assess current capabilities, identify improvement opportunities, and define measurable outcomes.
• Create and maintain product documentation, including requirements, process flows, and reports.
• Demonstrate behaviors aligned with the organization’s culture and values.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years in product management, business analysis, or data product ownership, including at least 2 years (preferred) in semantic modeling, ontology, taxonomy, canonical data models, or knowledge graphs.
• Experience taking a domain from undocumented or inconsistent sources through conceptual modeling, formal specification, validation, and production deployment.
• Working understanding of formal knowledge representation: class hierarchies, property definitions, cardinality, inheritance, logical constraints, and controlled vocabularies.
• Working knowledge of SQL, including the ability to independently profile source data to test whether a proposed model is supported.
• Proven ability to run modeling workshops and build consensus among SMEs with differing interpretations of terms.
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal, written, and presentation skills, with experience working with stakeholders at all levels, including executive management.
• Preferred: hands-on experience with ontology/semantic platforms such as RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, or SPARQL; property graphs such as Neo4j and Cypher; or a modern semantic layer tool.
• Preferred: mortgage origination or servicing domain knowledge, including familiarity with MISMO standards.

Technologies

• SQL
• RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL, SPARQL
• Neo4j, Cypher
• MISMO

Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision
• Paid Time Off Programs including vacation, holidays, illness, and parental leave
• Wellness Programs, Employee Recognition Programs, and onsite gyms and cafe style dining (select locations)
• Retirement benefits, life insurance, 401k match, and tuition reimbursement
• Philanthropy Programs including matching gifts, volunteer grants, charitable grants and corporate sponsorships
• Competitive salary; positions may offer bonus opportunities

Compensation

• Salary: $75,000 - $130,000 (individual salary may vary based on role, geographic location/market data, and skills/experience).
• Work model: OFFICE
• Some roles may be eligible for performance-based compensation and/or stock-based incentives based on company and individual performance.