Taxonomist

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Taxonomist who will design, implement, and maintain a robust taxonomy framework for Hearst Magazines. You will architect and manage the taxonomy frameworks that power content discovery, ad targeting, commerce integrations, and AI-driven personalization across our ecosystem. While your primary focus will be taxonomy development, you will also apply ontology principles to model relationships between content, products, and user intent, enabling smarter connections.

You will collaborate closely with editorial teams who create thousands of articles monthly, product and engineering teams building discovery features, and revenue teams building and optimizing ad targeting and retail media conversions. Your work will directly impact how users find, engage with, and act on our content.

Resonsibilities:

What You'll Do

Taxonomy Development
• Create and maintain category systems for organizing extensive content across multiple publications.
• Create structured hierarchies that enhance content discoverability across search and on-site navigation.
• Build consistent naming conventions that work across all our websites.
• Fix inconsistent or outdated categorization in existing content.
• Develop guidelines and workflows for content tagging to ensure accuracy and consistency.
• Establish governance guidelines and lead taxonomy versioning and change management processes as content categories evolve.

Making Content Shoppable
• Connect editorial content with relevant products (e.g., linking cooking articles to kitchen tools, fashion guides to apparel recommendations).
• Develop taxonomy frameworks for product catalogs and affiliate products.
• Develop methods to identify articles where readers are likely to make purchases.
• Create category systems for product reviews and buying guides.
• Work with the commerce team to improve how products are recommended within content.
• Design mechanisms to track which types of content drive purchases.

Improving Search & Recommendation
• Develop taxonomy structures that power recommendation systems that surface related articles based on reader interest and behavior.
• Help optimize the internal search engine to return more relevant results.
• Create structured content groupings to improve topic pages and navigation.
• Work with engineers and AI teams to improve automatic tagging using NLP and machine learning.
• Analyze search behavior and user engagement data to refine content categorization and recommendations.

Team Collaboration
• Work with SEO specialists to align categories with popular search terms.
• Partner with product teams to create intuitive site navigation, and filtering options.
• Help the analytics team measure taxonomy effectiveness and content performance.
• Collaborate with the advertising team to enhance contextual ad targeting and improve ad-content alignment.
• Collaborate with other taxonomists, particularly those focused on product taxonomy, to ensure consistent approaches across the organization.

Qualifications:

Who You Are
• 5-7 years experience in taxonomy development, metadata management, or ontology design within digital publishing, commerce, or AI-driven environments.
• Ability to apply ontology concepts to improve contextual ad targeting, commerce integrations, and AI-driven personalization.
• Strong analytical skills with experience using Google Analytics, and user behavior data to inform taxonomy decisions.
• Understanding of content management systems (CMS) and their role in taxonomy implementation.
• Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally with editors, engineers, product managers, and data scientists.

Bonus
• Background in search engine optimization (SEO) and its relationship with taxonomy.
• Experience with personalization and recommendation systems.
• Hands-on experience with AI, NLP, or machine learning models for content classification and tagging.
• Formal education in information science, library science, or computational linguistics.

The base salary for this role is between $149,000-$181,000. The actual base pay offered is dependent upon many factors, such as: transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.

Hearst Magazines provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veterans status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-12vbky-13-59-210-36-42 in your application.