Taxonomist

This role is for one of the Weekday's clients

Min Experience: 8 years

JobType: full-time

We are seeking an experienced and detail-oriented Senior Taxonomist to join our team and take ownership of building, maintaining, and optimizing taxonomies and metadata frameworks across digital platforms. This role is critical in ensuring consistent classification, discoverability, and management of content, products, and data assets. The ideal candidate will have a strong foundation in taxonomy development, metadata strategy, content classification, and information architecture, along with a proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to align taxonomy structure with business needs.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, metadata schemas, and ontologies for content and product classification.
• Analyze business requirements and user behavior to develop intuitive classification structures and tagging strategies that enhance content discoverability and search performance.
• Collaborate with stakeholders including product managers, content strategists, data teams, and UX designers to ensure taxonomy alignment with business goals and user needs.
• Conduct taxonomy audits and gap analyses to identify areas for improvement and develop plans for restructuring or optimization.
• Establish and enforce taxonomy governance policies, naming conventions, and documentation standards to ensure consistency and quality across platforms.
• Work closely with engineering and data teams to integrate taxonomy solutions into content management systems, PIM, DAM, and search platforms.
• Stay updated on industry best practices, tools, and technologies in taxonomy, metadata management, and information architecture.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Library Science, Information Science, Knowledge Management, Linguistics, or a related field.
• 8–15 years of hands-on experience in taxonomy development, metadata management, information architecture, or a related discipline.
• Strong understanding of controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, thesauri, and ontologies.
• Experience working with taxonomy management tools (e.g., PoolParty, Synaptica, Smartlogic, TopBraid, etc.).
• Proficiency in content management systems (CMS), product information management (PIM) systems, and digital asset management (DAM) platforms.
• Familiarity with search technologies and how taxonomy supports enterprise search, faceted navigation, and content personalization.
• Excellent analytical skills with the ability to interpret complex data sets and translate business needs into taxonomy solutions.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders and lead cross-functional initiatives.
• Detail-oriented with a deep commitment to accuracy and consistency.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in e-commerce, media, publishing, retail, or large-scale content-driven organizations.
• Knowledge of semantic technologies, RDF, SKOS, OWL, and linked data principles.
• Exposure to AI/ML tagging workflows and automation in metadata tagging and classification.