Staff AI Engineer (Data Ontologist)

Who We Are Welcome to TELUS Digital — where innovation drives impact at a global scale. As an award-winning digital product consultancy and the digital division of TELUS , one of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers, we design and deliver transformative customer experiences through cutting-edge technology, agile thinking, and a people-first culture. With a global team across North America, South America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and APAC, we offer end-to-end expertise across eight core service areas: Digital Product Consulting, Digital Marketing Services, Data & AI, Strategy Consulting, Business Operations Modernization, Enterprise Applications, Cloud Engineering, and QA & Test Engineering. From mobile apps and websites to voice UI, chatbots, AI, customer service, and in-store solutions, TELUS Digital enables seamless, trusted, and digitally powered experiences that meet customers wherever they are — all backed by the secure infrastructure and scale of our multi-billion-dollar parent company. The Opportunity TELUS Digital is seeking an AI Engineer / Data Ontologist to design and operationalize the semantic and contextual foundations that power intelligent AI systems. This role is critical in enabling AI agents to reason, retrieve, and act effectively by structuring knowledge, defining relationships, and optimizing how context is constructed, retrieved, and used in real time. You will bridge data, AI, and application layers, transforming fragmented enterprise information into coherent, machine-interpretable context that drives high-performance agentic systems and decision-making. Location and Flexibility This role can be fully remote for candidates based in Brazil, due to team distribution and occasional in-person opportunities. If you are based in São Paulo or Porto Alegre, you are welcome to work from one of our offices on a flexible schedule. Responsibilities Design and implement context architectures that enable AI systems to access, interpret, and reason over enterprise knowledge. Develop and maintain ontologies, schemas, and knowledge representations that structure domain knowledge across systems, ensuring consistency, reusability, and scalability. Define and optimize context assembly pipelines, including retrieval strategies, ranking logic, memory handling, and prompt/context composition for LLM-based systems. Build and manage semantic layers over structured and unstructured data, enabling effective grounding of AI agents in real-world business context. Design and implement knowledge graphs and context graphs to model relationships between entities, actions, and outcomes across enterprise systems. Collaborate with AI Engineers and Data teams to align embeddings, chunking strategies, and vector storage with ontology and semantic design. Establish standards for context quality, including evaluation frameworks for relevance, coherence, completeness, and business impact. Enable interoperability across AI systems by defining shared context interfaces, schemas, and protocols (e.g., MCP or API-based context services). Continuously refine context systems based on agent performance, feedback loops, and operational insights. Translate complex semantic and contextual concepts into actionable implementations for both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Qualifications Strong experience in designing semantic systems, ontologies, or knowledge graphs within complex data environments. Hands-on experience with knowledge representation techniques, including taxonomy design, entity-relationship modeling, and graph-based structures. Experience working with LLM-based systems, particularly in context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or agentic AI architectures. Deep understanding of embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval strategies, and how they interact with structured semantic layers. Experience designing context pipelines that integrate multiple data sources (APIs, databases, documents) into coherent inputs for AI systems. Familiarity with frameworks and tools related to graph databases (e.g., Neo4j), semantic layers, or metadata management. Strong understanding of trade-offs in context construction, including latency vs. completeness, precision vs. recall, and static vs. dynamic context. Experience working in cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and integrating AI systems into production-grade architectures. Ability to communicate complex semantic and AI concepts clearly across technical and business stakeholders. Bonus Points Experience with context graphs and advanced context orchestration patterns for agentic systems. Background in information science, knowledge engineering, or ontology design. Experience aligning AI systems with enterprise knowledge bases (e.g., CMS, knowledge management systems). Familiarity with evaluation frameworks for context quality and downstream agent performance. Experience designing reusable, cross-domain semantic layers for large organizations. Why TELUS Digital? At TELUS Digital, you'll work with world-class brands like FOX, HBO, PepsiCo, and Domino's, building transformative digital products that impact millions. Our global reach allows you to collaborate with diverse, international teams, solving complex problems and delivering tech-driven solutions that matter. We thrive on engineering excellence, using the latest technologies in cloud computing, AI, machine learning, DevOps, microservices architecture, and data engineering. Our teams embrace Agile methodologies, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and a DevOps-first mindset to deliver solutions at scale. In addition to being part of an international and innovative consultancy company, you will have: A Global Innovation Hub: Be part of an international consultancy at the forefront of technology Work-Life Harmony: Enjoy flexible hours and autonomy to balance your professional and personal life Cutting-Edge Tech Playground: Dive into the latest technologies and shape the future of digital solutions Prestigious Partnerships: Collaborate with world-renowned brands, making a real impact in the market Growth-Centric Environment: Thrive in our collaborative ecosystem with a clear career development path Global Exposure: Embrace optional international travel opportunities to broaden your horizons Some of our benefits: Health and dental plan Life insurance Monthly voucher for meals, culture, education, health and mobility Child care assistance and more! Equal Opportunity Employer At TELUS Digital, we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. All aspects of employment, including the decision to hire and promote, are based on applicants’ qualifications, merits, competence and performance without regard to any characteristic related to diversity. We will only use the information you provide to process your application and to produce tracking statistics. Since we do not request personal data deemed sensitive, we ask you to abstain from sharing that information with us. For more information on how we use your information, see our Privacy Policy .