Product Owner - Ontology

PENNYMAC

Pennymac is (NYSE: PFSI) is a specialty financial services firm with a comprehensive mortgage platform and integrated business focused on the production and servicing of U.S. mortgage loans and the management of investments related to the U.S. mortgage market.

At Pennymac, our people are the foundation of our success and at the heart of our dynamic work culture. Together, we work towards a unified goal of helping millions of Americans achieve aspirations of homeownership through the complete mortgage journey.

A Typical Day

The Ontology Product Owner owns the enterprise semantic layer that represents Pennymac's business. This role defines how core entities are modeled once and reused across origination, servicing, and enterprise AI workflows. The role connects business domain experts, data engineering, architecture, risk and compliance, and the teams building applications and AI agents on top of the ontology.

As a Product Owner, you will manage complex initiatives that span multiple integrated business systems and departments. You will create operational efficiencies by designing new business processes, act as a domain expert in end-to-end business functions, and drive technology solutions and workflow optimization across the division.

The Ontology Product Owner will:

• Define and champion the enterprise ontology product vision, strategy, and roadmap.

• Own the end-to-end product lifecycle, from ideation, requirements, and prioritization through development, launch, and iteration.

• Make sure product decisions align with broader strategic initiatives, including revenue opportunities and cost-saving measures identified by product and business leadership.

• Communicate product strategy, progress, and outcomes to senior management and other stakeholders.

• Own and prioritize the ontology change backlog. Establish and run the ontology governance process, including change review and approval, impact assessment, and a stewardship model with named owners per domain.

• Partner with data engineering on hydration: map source systems to object types and confirm pipelines keep the model current.

• Define competency questions and validation tests for each domain model, confirming the model answers the questions the business actually asks before it ships.

• Define adoption and quality metrics: 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 ensure product success.

• Translate business needs into clear goals, user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional requirements using use cases, process flows, and data analysis.

• Serve as a domain expert for the business functions your product supports: assess current capabilities, find 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.

What You’ll Bring

• 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 and the ability to profile source data independently to test whether a proposed model is supported by the data.

• Proven ability to run modeling workshops and build consensus among SMEs who disagree about what a term means.

• Excellent interpersonal, verbal, written, and presentation skills, with experience working with stakeholders at all levels, including executive management.

• Preferred: Hands-on experience with at least one ontology or semantic platform, 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.

Why You Should Join

As one of the top mortgage lenders in the country, Pennymac has helped over 4 million lifetime homeowners achieve and sustain their aspirations of home. Our vision is to be the most trusted partner for home. Together, 4,000 Pennymac team members across the country are guided by our core values: to be Accountable, Reliable and Ethical in all that we do.

Pennymac is committed to conducting a business that makes positive contributions and promotes long-term sustainable growth and to fostering an equitable and inclusive environment, where all employees and customers feel valued, respected and supported.

Benefits That Bring It Home: Whether you're looking for flexible benefits for today, setting up short-term goals for tomorrow, or planning for long-term success and retirement, Pennymac's benefits have you covered. Some key benefits include:

• 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

• We value the hard work and dedication of our employees. In addition to a competitive salary, positions may offer bonus opportunities.

To learn more about our benefits visit:

https://pennymacnews.page.link/benefits

For residents with state required benefit information, additional information can be found at: https://www.pennymac.com/additional-benefits-information

Compensation: Individual salary may vary based on multiple factors including specific role, geographic location / market data, and skills and experience as defined below:

• Lower in range - Building skills and experience in the role

• Mid-range - Experience and skills align with proficiency in the role

• Higher in range - Experience and skills add value above typical requirements of the role

Some roles may be eligible for performance-based compensation and/or stock-based incentives awarded to employees based on company and individual performance.

Salary

$75,000 - $130,000

Work Model

OFFICE