Senior Software Engineer - RDF Infrastructure

Our group

The BQL and Semantic Platform group builds the core query and semantic infrastructure used to access, analyze, model, and organize Bloomberg data.

The group develops the BQL engine, which powers Bloomberg Query Language and provides a common way to query and analyze data across Bloomberg. We also build the semantic platform used to define, manage, and materialize the semantic artifacts that describe Bloomberg data and the relationships between it.

Together, these capabilities provide the foundation for making Bloomberg data consistently queryable and semantically connected across products, applications, and emerging AI-driven use cases.

Our team

As part of Bloomberg’s investment in Semantic Technologies, we are building and operating Bloomberg’s RDF triplestore infrastructure.

Our team develops the database itself, working across the internals of graph storage and query processing rather than simply deploying or operating an existing database product.

Our work spans physical storage and indexing, SPARQL query planning and execution, transaction and isolation semantics, statistics and cardinality estimation, inference, replication, scalability, and operational reliability.

The platform stores semantic models and large RDF datasets used by engineering teams across Bloomberg. We are responsible for making billions of RDF statements efficiently queryable while providing the performance, correctness, availability, and reliability expected of enterprise-grade database infrastructure.

Our tech stack

RDF4J, LMDB, RocksDB, PostgreSQL, Java, Python, SPARQL, SHACL, RDF, Inferencing

You’ll need to have

• 4+ years of professional software development experience
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Hands-on experience developing database or graph database internals, rather than solely building applications on top of databases
• Experience developing RDF triplestore, labeled property graph, or closely related graph database infrastructure
• Strong understanding of several areas of database implementation, such as:
• Storage engines, indexing, and physical data representation
• Query planning, optimization, and execution
• Transactions, concurrency, and isolation
• Cardinality estimation and database statistics
• Caching, memory management, and disk I/O
• Replication, recovery, or high-availability architecture

• Strong software engineering skills in Java or another systems-oriented programming language

We’d love to see

• Deep experience with Eclipse RDF4J, Apache Jena, or another RDF triplestore implementation
• Experience with labeled property graph database internals or graph query engines
• Experience implementing or optimizing SPARQL, Cypher, Gremlin, or other graph query languages
• Experience with RDF or graph storage layouts and indexing strategies
• Experience contributing to or modifying open-source database engines
• Experience with LMDB, RocksDB, or other embedded key-value or storage engines
• Knowledge of RDF, SPARQL, SHACL, inference, and Semantic Web standards
• Experience diagnosing database performance at large scale, including memory, I/O, query planning, and storage bottlenecks