Materials Domain Specialist (Knowledge Architect)

About the role

Patsnap's Materials team is building a connected, continuously improving corpus of structured materials knowledge drawn from patents, scientific literature, technical datasheets, standards and other sources. This corpus powers AI products that help R&D and IP professionals search, extract and reason over materials science. As Materials Domain Specialist (Knowledge Architect), you will define how materials knowledge is represented and what counts as evidence, turning expert judgment into schemas, ontologies, reproducible guidelines and benchmarks. The position is full-time, permanent and based in the Singapore office.

Key responsibilities

• Own the ontology, schema and normalization layer that represents materials, compositions, structures, properties, processing and measurement context across patents, literature, datasheets and other sources.
• Set the evidence standard: what a source discloses versus implies, how facts are linked to the correct material, formulation or tested sample, and how provenance, confidence and conflicting values are represented.
• Design how entities and facts from different sources resolve to one another and how relationships across materials, applications and performance are made explicit and queryable.
• Build benchmarks and gold standards for extraction, search and agentic reasoning, defining task scope, adjudicating gold sets, setting metrics and release gates, and maintaining regression cases.
• Close the loop from customer usage, agent traces and model failures back into versioned schema changes, rules and curation fixes.
• Run internal and external curation operations, including reviewer calibration, vendor delivery, quality gates and throughput and cost reporting.
• Serve as the team's lead adjudicator for difficult materials-data questions and as the domain voice in decisions about how agents query, weigh and reason over materials knowledge.

Required profile

• Degree in polymer science, chemistry, materials science, chemical engineering, metallurgy or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years working deeply with materials or chemical technical information, such as examining and analysing patents, curating scientific databases, building materials data resources and/or product master data management.
• Strong evidence judgment across source types, distinguishing claimed scope from example facts, explicit disclosure from inference and reported values from their measurement conditions.
• Able to interpret polymer structures, repeat units, generic or Markush definitions, formulations, ranges, measurement context and property-to-sample relationships.
• Experience designing or stewarding structured representations of domain knowledge (ontologies, schemas, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, normalization rules).
• Experience translating expert judgment into repeatable guidelines and deterministic rules, and leading projects, reviewers or specialist partners against delivery schedules and acceptance criteria.
• Clear communication of complex decisions to product and engineering teams, and professional working proficiency in English and Chinese.

Nice-to-haves

• Knowledge graph, entity resolution, information retrieval or search-evaluation experience.
• Familiarity with how LLM-based agents retrieve and use structured knowledge (retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, agent evaluation).
• Chemical structure, cheminformatics or scientific-database experience.
• Experience managing outsourced or distributed teams.
• Proficiency with agentic productivity tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) and an additional patent language.