Jobs / United States / Altos Labs INC
Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards (Contract)
Altos Labs INC · 🇺🇸 San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 10 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 1 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Altos Labs INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles1 certified filing for “Senior Scientist I” (Data Scientists) in CA: $199k–$199k, median $199k. Most were filed at wage level IV (100%) — 4 lottery entries, ≈61% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
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Sponsor Radar — Altos Labs INC
The US Department of Labor certified 10 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 1 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Altos Labs INC →
About the role
Our Mission Our mission is to restore cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life. For more information, see our website at altoslabs.com. Our Value Our Single Altos Value: Everyone Owns Achieving Our Inspiring Mission . Diversity at Altos Altos Labs has been named one of the Top 3 Biotech Companies and ranked for the second year on the Forbes 2026 Best Startups in America list. At Altos, exceptional scientists and industry leaders from around the world work together to advance a shared mission. Our intentional focus is on Belonging, so that all employees know that they are valued for their unique perspectives. We are all accountable for sustaining a diverse and inclusive environment. What You Will Contribute To Altos • As a contract Senior Knowledge Engineer, Ontology and Data Standards, you will drive how our team represents biological knowledge At Altos • We have built the machinery: a large canonical LinkML/Biolink schema including REST/MCP/CLI service layer; specification packages covering multiple prior-knowledge sources; and an agentic / human-in-the-loop curation framework. What it lacks is a technical owner—someone to govern and administer the content. • You are the scientific translation layer between biological discovery and AI platform engineering. You will elicit implicit models from bench and computational scientists, encode them rigorously, and utilize the agentic workflows that scale curation beyond what manual review can reach. • This role carries explicit decision rights: review authority on canonical schema change, ownership of the curation conventions that data atlas and engineering teams follow. Key Responsibilities • Knowledge Modeling & Ontology Engineering: • Design, maintain, and extend internal LinkML / Biolink models and ontologies covering experimental and prior-knowledge metadata—driven by competency questions from user requirements and not by source-side convenience. • Own mapping and alignment as a discipline: cross-ontology mappings with recorded justification and provenance, and upstream term requests as appropriate. • Serve as reviewer of record for schema change, holding the line that reuse precedes coining anything new. • Agentic & Automated Curation: • Administer, steer, and refine our agentic curation framework and Model Context Protocol (MCP) service layer to scale data profiling, validation, and entity mapping far beyond manual capacity. • Standardize tool definitions (FastMCP), prompt templates, and LLM-driven workflows that extract, normalize, and validate metadata from prior-knowledge sources and experimental assets. • Biological Data Harmonization: • Define mapping patterns and metadata conventions for diverse experimental modalities (genomics, single-cell, screening data) to conform to the canonical schema. • Establish standardized conventions that allow both external prior-knowledge sources and internal experimental datasets to cleanly map into the LinkML graph architecture. • Quality, Evaluation & Provenance: • Establish and maintain automated validation, LLM-assisted quality control, and CI/CD under a "curation as code" paradigm—extending existing drift and coverage gates into the places where semantic review is still manual. • Measure whether the knowledge is correct, not merely reproducible: gold-standard sets, inter-curator agreement, and precision/recall on automated extraction. Who You Are • Education & Experience: PhD with 5+ years, or MS with 8+ years, in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics, Systems Biology, or a related life science field. This is a senior individual-contributor role with organization-wide technical authority and no direct reports.