Principal Systems Ontologist

Principal Systems Ontologist at CrowdStrike

As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We’re also a mission-driven company. We cultivate a culture that gives every CrowdStriker both the flexibility and autonomy to own their careers. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

About The Role

The Vision: The security industry is drowning in “observed symptoms” while starving for at-testable truth. At CrowdStrike, we are building a high integrity infrastructure fabric – a platform that doesn’t just scan for risks, but proves them through a deterministic digital twin of the enterprise.

As the Principal Systems Ontologist, you will be the lead designer of a system that treats global infrastructure as a formal graph, where every node and edge is traced back to a versioned source of truth. This role is a part of the Product CTO organization that includes a team of Technical Strategy leaders that bring outstanding ideas, the ability to execute cross-functionally, and teamwork to a strategic, high future impact organization.

The Challenge You’ll Solve

How do you build a system that reconciles on-premise data centers with the abstract topology of multi-cloud environments? How do you design an inference engine that rejects non-deterministic reasoning in favor of high performance, deterministic logic? You will architect the “Chain of Custody” for infrastructure data, ensuring that every insight is backed by irrefutable evidence.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the end-to-end pipeline of immutable raw data preservation to canonical semantic transformation chains.
• Architect Multi-Layered Evaluation Logic: Lead design of a logic engine to calculate effective exposure by intersecting network topology, resource configurations, and perimeter constraints.
• Graph Strategy: Contribution to a multi-backend graph architecture optimized for both real time temporal state and deep multihop path analysis.
• Work Cross-functionally: Work closely with Asset Platform, Risk Platform, Ingest, and Design Teams.
• Lead, Mentor, and Align: Guide a multidisciplinary team of engineers, taxonomists, and subject matter experts in distilling vendor specific noise into a unified topography of risk.
• Provide support to the wider CTO organization including the Falcon Fund, Privacy & Cyber Policy, Data Science and Detection Architecture teams, as well as the broader CrowdStrike organization as needed.
• Work with industry analysts to provide product updates, briefings, and demonstrations.

What You'll Need

• A proven history of architecting large scale distributed systems where data integrity and performance are paramount.
• Deep expertise in formal logic, relational algebra, and graph theory applied to practical, high performance systems engineering.
• Demonstrable experience in bi-temporal data modeling and event driven architectures.
• Proficiency in modern systems languages (e.g., Go, Rust).
• Exceptional leadership skills; the ability to move stakeholders from “intuition-based” thinking to formal attested models.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a relevant field.
• Minimum of 5 years relevant work experience.
• Superior communication skills including experience presenting to senior & executive level management.
• Excellent people and project management skills to manage projects and interact/build rapport with staff, colleagues, cross-functional teams and third parties.

Bonus Points

• Experience architecting systems in large scale infrastructure management or observability.
• A track record of designing abstractions that allow non specialists to model complex topological relationships.
• Experience evolving data systems towards a modern, model driven architecture.

Benefits Of Working At CrowdStrike

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards.
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs.
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge.
• Paid parental and adoption leaves.
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role.
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections.
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities.
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe.

Key skills/competency

• Ontology Design
• Graph Theory
• Formal Logic
• Distributed Systems
• Data Integrity
• Systems Architecture
• Cybersecurity
• Event-Driven Architectures
• Go/Rust
• Cross-functional Leadership