Senior Manager - Ontologist / Taxonomist

Norstella Group; Greater London; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

A global life sciences solutions company is seeking a Senior Manager - Ontologist / Taxonomist in London. This role involves leading cross-functional teams to optimize data strategy and implement innovative solutions. The ideal candidate will have over 8 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical sector and a strong background in stakeholder management. Key responsibilities include managing a team, driving collaboration across departments, and contributing to data roadmaps, ensuring alignment with business goals. This position offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits including extensive leave days.

Benefits

25 days annual leave

Group Life Assurance

Group Income Protection

Health Screening

Critical Illness cover

Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in biopharma intelligence or life sciences consulting.
• Experience guiding teams and product development.
• Familiarity with taxonomy management tools and knowledge graphs.

Responsibilities

• Lead cross-functional collaborations and client engagements.
• Manage a team of data professionals.
• Enhance content datasets with innovative solutions.

Skills

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Data strategy

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Life Sciences

Tools

Microsoft Office

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Senior Manager - Ontologist / Taxonomist

Company: Norstella
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: Dec 8, 2025
Employment Type: Full Time
Job ID: R-1613

Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions provider dedicated to improving patient access to life‑saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.

Norstella unites market‑leading brands — Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, Skipta and The Dedham Group — and delivers must‑have answers and insights, leveraging AI, for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision‑making. We help our clients:

• Accelerate the drug development cycle
• Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
• Make data‑driven commercial and financial decisions
• Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
• Identify and address barriers to therapies

Norstella serves most pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI‑driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella’s investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.

This Senior Manager for Ontology / Taxonomy is a people‑leader position part of the Content Strategy team within Norstella Content Operations. As a leader in the Data Governance team, the role will be instrumental in integrating our various product strands to enable our customers to easily search and navigate across our products and data solutions, and also enabling faster innovation through clear standards and high‑quality linked data. The role will include managing at least two direct reports, so line management experience is essential.

This position will see the Ontology team pivot from 18 months of work with significant focus on support and delivery of various Content team projects to become focused more on supporting product and business opportunities and integrating other third‑party and customer‑specific taxonomies. The role will include the development and ongoing management of the team roadmap, contributing to data roadmaps and communicating progress to leadership.

This role will be well suited to someone with a deep knowledge of the life sciences who enjoys collaborating on cross‑functional projects and leading a team of taxonomists and knowledge engineers to deliver high‑quality results.

The Senior Manager role for Ontology / Taxonomy is critical in the strategic direction of transformational programs and projects to address key business priorities in collaboration with cross‑functional business units (technology, product, services etc.) focusing on:

• Optimization – Champion operational efficiency
• Utilization – Maximize data utility and unlock opportunities to leverage Norstella data across the business to drive value
• Thought Partnership – Spearhead data strategy and client engagement

Responsibilities

Serve as trusted Content SME and thought partner advising leaders across Norstella.

• Lead cross‑functional stakeholder relationships and client engagements, driving collaboration with key contacts in Product, Services, Technology and Data Science etc.
• Responsible for the articulation/positioning and scalable implementation of how our data resolves up to value to clients.
• Responsible for cogent translation of complex, data‑driven concepts into business‑digestible ROI aligning with enterprise‑wide priorities.
• Report to executive leadership team on progress, risks and implications of strategic initiatives.

Lead end‑to‑end enhancement of content datasets, leading capability expansion

• Spearhead identification of whitespace, structural gaps and opportunities for new enhancements and impactful solutions, including AI‑driven ones.
• Lead data extraction, interpretation and generation of actionable insights / strategic recommendations.
• Architecture of feasible, innovative, and scalable enhancements and solutions, including AI‑driven ones.
• Establish efficient and representative testing strategies at incubator stage as part of Content validation.

Lead strategic alignment of the following Transformation streams within Content Ops

• Data strategy (e.g., content optimization, data governance, reconciliation of data across disparate datasets, AI enablement)
• Operational (e.g., institutionalization of technological change, setting best practices for Content Ops, process engineering, aligning operational excellence with commercial needs of Norstella)
• Organizational (e.g., defining target operating model & upstream institutional structure, aligning talent utilization with commercial needs of Norstella)

Team management

• Implement performance management structures committed to delivering excellence, ensuring clear development and delivery goals for reports and being accountable for their delivery of those goals.
• Ensure all team members are aligned on business priorities and strategy, and are delivering with a regular cadence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree preferentially in Life Sciences, Pharmacy, Medical Sciences, or equivalent field.
• 8+ years’ experience preferably in a biopharma intelligence, business research, life sciences consulting domain, 3+ years in leadership roles.
• Experience of collaborating successfully with product teams, data scientists, editorial and content teams, and developing proprietary data standards as well as incorporating established taxonomies.
• Understanding product needs and guiding the development of new mappings and classifications which deliver business and content objectives.
• Success in acting as a thought leader and an internal champion for data standards. Converting technical and specialist language into compelling stories is extremely important.
• Regular engagement with customers to explain capabilities, understand their requirements and convey the benefits of Norstella’s approach to ontologies and data more generally.
• Experience of successfully leading and managing a team and supporting them in delivering on planned goals while responding and adapting to change where necessary.
• Coaching taxonomists, knowledge engineers, data analysts, and others on data mapping and discovery projects.
• Familiarity with taxonomy management tools and developing and maintaining knowledge graphs.
• A good understanding of clinical processes and vocabulary.
• Experience of developing guidelines and other documentation related to ontologies.
• Technical expertise in database tools.
• Knowledge of health information systems, including EMR and claims processing.
• Proficiency with RDF, SPARQL.
• Interest in, and ideally some familiarity with, NLP and AI techniques.
• Deep understanding of how life science data is published, captured and processed to translate real‑world events into structured content.
• Strong understanding of drug development lifecycle and processes.
• Strong experience in building and executing business cases for strategic initiatives.
• Highly proficient stakeholder management, managerial and interpersonal skills.
• Excellent proficiency in Microsoft Office, including Sharepoint, Excel and PowerPoint, Monday.com, LucidChart, Jira, Confluence.
• Impeccable or native English verbal and written communication.

Our Guiding Principles for success at Norstella

01: Bold, Passionate, and Mission‑First
02: Integrity, Truth, and Reality
03: Kindness, Empathy, and Grace
04: Resilience, Mettle, and Perseverance
05: Humility, Gratitude, and Learning

Please note: All candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. We do not provide visa sponsorship or transfers. We are not currently accepting candidates who are on an OPT visa.

• 25 days annual leave, 4 days for volunteering and a personal day
• Group Life Assurance (100% employer funded)
• Group Income Protection (100% employer funded)
• Other voluntary benefits such as: Dental, Cash Plan, PMI Excess Cover, Health Screening & Critical Illness

Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy‑related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.

Sometimes the best opportunities are hidden by self‑doubt. We disqualify ourselves before we have the opportunity to be considered. Regardless of where you came from, how you identify, or the path that led you here‑you are welcome. If you read this job description and feel passion and excitement, we’re just as excited about you.

All legitimate roles with Norstella will be posted on Norstella’s job board which is located at norstella.com/careers. If a role is not posted on this job board, a candidate should assume the role is not a legitimate role with Norstella. Norstella is not responsible for an application that may be submitted by or through a third‑party and candidates should proceed with extreme caution if a third‑party approaches them about an open role with Norstella. Norstella will never ask for anything of value or any type of payment during or as part of any recruitment, interview or pre‑hire onboarding process. If you are aware of or have reason to believe a job posting purportedly for a role with Norstella is fraudulent or otherwise not authorized by Norstella, please contact the company using the following email address: [emailprotected].