Data & Knowledge Intelligence – Architect Lead

ABOUT UNIVERS

Univers combines global operating scale, deep industrial intelligence, and recognition from the institutions shaping energy, technology, and sustainability. The platforms built for the last decade were designed to monitor.

Univers was built to act - not just report.

Univers operates at global scale:

• 1,070 GW+ Energy assets under AI management
• 450M+ Connected sensors and devices
• 800+ Enterprise customers
• Leader Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader

Home - Univers

ROLE OVERVIEW / THE OPPORTUNITY

We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Architect Lead - Data & Knowledge Intelligence to lead the technical architecture, semantic design, and AI-readiness for our enterprise Physical AI platform. In this role, you will define and execute the target-state architecture that bridges fragmented IT, OT and IoT (sensor telemetry) environments, transforming raw heterogeneous data into a unified, semantically rich operational foundation.

You will serve as the principal authority on Knowledge Graphs, Industrial Ontologies, Semantic Search, and Contextual AI Services. You will architect a permission-aware knowledge layer that enables advanced analytics, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and autonomous AI Agents to reason, predict, and execute safe, governed actions back into operational physical systems.

RESPONSIBILITIES / WHAT YOU WILL DO

Data Foundation & Knowledge Intelligence Architecture

• Define the technical roadmap, architectural standards, and system boundaries for the Data & Knowledge Intelligence layer.
• Architect an operational domain ontology representing real-world physical assets, sensors, spatial-temporal relationships, events, business logic, and governed operational actions.
• Establish standards using Knowledge Graphs and semantic approaches (e.g., RDF, OWL, SHACL, or Property Graphs) where they deliver concrete enterprise value.
• Build core capabilities for semantic mapping, master & reference data management (MDM), asset hierarchy management, schema drift handling, and temporal/geospatial entity resolution.
• Architect scalable ingestion, streaming, and Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines connecting enterprise IT platforms, relational databases, data lakes, and document repositories.
• Lead integration strategies for industrial OT systems (SCADA, MES, Historians, BMS/EMS) and IoT protocols (OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus) across edge, hybrid, and cloud environments.
• Design architectures resilient to intermittent network connectivity, out-of-order time-series telemetry, schema evolution, and edge-to-cloud synchronization.
• Create a secure, permission-aware context and semantic retrieval layer that feeds vectorized, graph-backed operational context into LLMs, RAG, and AI Agent workflows.
• Architect mechanisms for AI Agents to execute write-backs or control actions into physical operational systems, enforcing strict policy controls, human-in-the-loop approvals, auditability, idempotency, and fail-safe handling.
• Ensure end-to-end data lineage, data quality, tenant isolation, and fine-grained access control across all graph and vector knowledge stores.

Technical Leadership & Stakeholder Alignment

• Establish clear API/SDK service contracts and reference architectures to ensure customer implementations strengthen the core product rather than creating fragmented one-off solutions.
• Lead design reviews and align stakeholders across product engineering, infrastructure, security, and compliance teams in multiple regions.
• Identify scalability and reliability bottlenecks; design long-term solutions for high-traffic, low-latency, globally distributed systems.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers; raise the bar for engineering quality, documentation, and operational excellence.
• Evaluate new technologies and guide pragmatic adoption (e.g., platform frameworks, cloud patterns, distributed data systems).
• Drive cross-team execution for large initiatives: architecture roadmap, risk management, and delivery governance.
• Collaborate closely with product managers and business stakeholders to deeply understand business pain points, propose technical solutions, and drive mission-critical projects to completion.

REQUIREMENTS / WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Proven experience designing and evolving service-oriented / microservice architectures, including high availability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of API architecture (REST/gRPC), authentication/authorization, rate limiting, versioning, developer experience, and platform governance.
• Knowledge Graphs & Ontology: Deep expertise in semantic modeling, ontology modeling, knowledge graph technologies (GraphDB, Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, RDF/OWL/SHACL, or Property Graphs), and digital twin representations.
• AI & Agentic Systems: Hands-on architectural experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, LLM context provisioning, agentic tool permissioning, and AI-driven workflow execution.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, concurrency, caching, messaging/streaming, and multi-region resilience.
• Hands-on ability to produce high-quality technical designs and influence implementation; comfortable diving into code when needed.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a passion for engineering excellence and setting high technical standards in security architecture.
• 10+ years of experience in software design and development, with a track record of building large-scale enterprise systems.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems; hands-on experience in designing and developing platforms for traffic risk control, transaction fraud detection, or account security is highly preferred.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and drive projects forward with efficiency.
• Experience integrating heterogeneous enterprise systems and working with both IT data and OT/IoT data from industrial or physical environments.
• Excellent communication, with the ability to align executives, engineers, product teams, field teams and customers around difficult technical decisions.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience in energy, utilities, manufacturing, transportation, buildings, infrastructure or another asset-intensive industry.
• Hands-on familiarity with industrial systems such as historians, SCADA, MES, EAM/CMMS or BMS/EMS and protocols such as OPC UA, MQTT or Modbus.
• Experience with data catalogs, semantic layers, digital twins, master data management, entity resolution or ontology tooling.
• Experience with agentic AI, RAG, model and agent governance, tool permissioning, human-in-the-loop workflows or governed write-back.
• Experience establishing developer platforms, APIs, SDKs, connector ecosystems or open-source and partner programs.
• Experience leading globally distributed teams and delivering platforms across multiple regulatory and deployment environments.