Lead Data Taxonomist

Lead Data Taxonomist

The New York Times is seeking a Lead Data Taxonomist to architect and steward our enterprise-wide event taxonomy. This role is crucial for improving data quality, powering recommendation engines, personalization algorithms, and future AI initiatives across our diverse products including News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic.

About The Role

As the Lead Data Taxonomist, you will be responsible for the New York Times' global event data catalog and taxonomy. You will work at the intersection of Product, Data Platform, and Analytics, ensuring all interactions are captured through a standardized, semantic lens. You will report to the Executive Director, Data & Insights.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a multi-domain enterprise taxonomy transferable across all NYT products.
• Establish and enforce global events, properties, values, and naming conventions.
• Own the definition and lifecycle of global events tracking the user journey across the NYT ecosystem.
• Act as the final authority for the taxonomy, approving or rejecting proposed changes.
• Oversee the enterprise event catalog, ensuring it serves as a high-fidelity source of truth.
• Define and monitor domain-specific KPIs for data quality, security, and integration.
• Collaborate with engineers to improve instrumentation and align taxonomy with Kafka infrastructure.
• Partner with Analytics Engineering to develop the larger New York Times ontology.
• Facilitate and provide oversight for data councils concerning events and metrics.
• Provide support and training to product and analytics teams on event tracking.
• Advocate for information architecture best practices and Master Data Management (MDM) principles.
• Demonstrate support for journalistic independence and the company's mission.

Key Skills/Competency

• Data Taxonomy
• Data Ontology
• Data Architecture
• Technical Product Management
• Digital Analytics Implementation
• Information Architecture
• Event Cataloging
• JSON
• SQL
• Python