Senior Knowledge Representation Specialist

Are you looking to develop your Data career? Do you enjoy innovating through technology?

About the role

As a Senior Knowledge Representation Specialist you develop and maintain the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT), a large, multilingual health care ontology. You are responsible for enhancing EMMeT to improve its application in search and discovery products such as ClinicalKey, and to provide support for the Health Knowledge Graph (H-Graph) and clinical decision support products. You work with a team of other Knowledge Representation Specialists in health and life sciences, data scientists, and product leads, to determine how to best build and leverage semantic capabilities and to automate and standardize ontology development processes. Specialists in languages other than English oversee the maintenance of EMMeT in selected target languages for international use.

About the Team

You will join a small, highly specialised team responsible for the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT) - the clinical knowledge backbone behind Elsevier’s search, AI, and clinical decision-support products. The team sits at the intersection of clinical expertise, data science, and product development.

Our role is to ensure that medical concepts are accurate, consistent, and usable by machines, so that Elsevier’s digital and AI-driven products deliver reliable, evidence-based results to healthcare professionals worldwide.

Because of the team’s size, you will have high ownership and visibility. Every team member plays a key role in shaping the taxonomy, setting editorial standards, and deciding how clinical knowledge is represented across products and platforms.

Responsibilities

• Develop, update, and maintain the Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy (EMMeT) in alignment with Elsevier’s clinical product roadmap
• Adapt and extend domain ontologies to support information extraction, data modeling, analytics, and search & discovery
• Maintain and enhance mappings to core clinical vocabularies such as ICD-10, SNOMED-CT, and LOINC
• Improve EMMeT quality, coverage, and precision through concept integration, hierarchy maintenance, data clean-up, and indexing optimization
• Validate clinical accuracy by applying domain expertise and collaborating with external clinical experts, ensuring alignment with current evidence, guidelines, and standards
• Contribute to and uphold editorial policies, working with the EMMeT team to prioritize and manage taxonomy updates
• Propose and implement enhancements based on product needs, QA outcomes, and user feedback, including support for automation initiatives
• Support data science and localization efforts, including automated knowledge extraction, question generation, and translation of EMMeT into European and Latin American languages

Requirements

• Professional or advanced degree (eg, Masters, PhD, MD, or PharmD) in a biomedical science
• Excellent command of the English language in both spoken and written forms, as is the ability to classify knowledge in the health care domain
• Language proficiency in French or German is highly desirable
• Experience with medical vocabularies such as SNOMED CT and ICD-10 is beneficial, as is knowledge of ontology modeling
• Proficiency in a Microsoft Windows environment, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Experience with ontology management tools, RDF, and SPARQL is a plus
• Demonstrated problem-solving ability, sense of urgency, and ability to prioritize tasks, to work simultaneously on multiple projects, and to ensure completion of editorial team projects to meet tight timelines

Working for you

We know that your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career, as this role is global, benefits may vary according to your location. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:

• Health care plans and benefits
• Modern Family Benefits, including maternity, paternity, adoption and surrogacy
• Life assurance and accident policies
• Comprehensive pension and retirement plans
• Access to learning and development resources

Work in a way that works for you

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals.

Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive