Taxonomist II

Summary

Join Instacart's Taxonomy team as a Taxonomist and play a pivotal role in ensuring accurate product categorization, improving taxonomy structures, and scaling taxonomy solutions. You will conduct regular audits of the taxonomy, develop monitoring tools, partner with ML to improve quality and coverage using AI, analyze data using SQL, manage a BPO vendor, and spearhead new initiatives. Responsibilities also include building and maintaining taxonomy definitions, governing the categorization structure, fixing errors, and supporting processes for model re-training. This role requires experience in classification-type problems, a Bachelor's degree, experience with LLMs and AI tools, strong communication skills, and proficiency in SQL. The role offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including equity grants, and is remote.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience working on classification-type problems within taxonomy, digital asset management, content management, search, navigation, user experience, product metadata, e-commerce or related fields
• Bachelor’s degree in library science, information science, business, commerce, data, or related field
• Experience creating LLM prompts and using AI tools to improve workflows and systems
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, particularly with Product, ML, and Engineering teams
• Experience leading or supporting cross-functional projects end-to-end
• Ability to thrive in an ambiguous environment that requires willingness to innovate and iterate to find the right solution
• Intermediate proficiency in SQL and Excel/Google Sheets to query and analyze structured data
• Experience using analytical skills to pull, analyze, and make data-driven business decisions
• Experience working with large datasets of structured or unstructured data
• Experience working with product attributes, metadata, and/or large datasets
• Proven track record of strong ownership and bias to action to drive key business results
• Strong attention to detail. Proven track record of continuously improving existing processes, especially by leveraging AI

Responsibilities

• Improving Taxonomy Quality and Coverage (70%): Conduct regular audits of our taxonomy to assess taxonomy accuracy and ensure products are categorized to the correct taxonomy nodes
• Develop and maintain monitoring tools and dashboards to monitor new product taxonomy coverage and ensure our taxonomy pipelines are in SLA
• Partner with ML to drive initiatives to use AI and human-in-the-loop techniques to improve taxonomy quality and coverage
• Pull and analyze data using SQL to uncover opportunities to improve taxonomy quality
• Manage BPO vendor that assists with taxonomy classification
• Spearhead new initiatives to improve taxonomy quality across our catalog of millions of products
• Support and consult on cross-functional projects where taxonomy data is used by downstream teams, such as Search, Replacements, Ads, and Browse
• Taxonomy Governance (30%): Build and maintain robust taxonomy definitions
• Govern our complex taxonomy categorization structure. This may include optimizing our structure, adding new taxonomy categories, and de-duplicating overlapping concepts
• Fixing taxonomy errors/bugs
• Support and optimize processes for product categorization model re-training due to taxonomy structure changes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with catalogs at an e-commerce, retail, or technology company
• Experience developing taxonomies or ontologies to support business systems and user experiences
• Experience with data management (e.g. large-scale data labelling, data QA, improving data quality and/or coverage)
• Masters degree in related fields: Library & Information Science, Data Management

Benefits

• Instacart provides highly market-competitive compensation and benefits in each location where our employees work
• This role is remote and the base pay range for a successful candidate is dependent on their permanent work location
• Offers may vary based on many factors, such as candidate experience and skills required for the role
• Additionally, this role is eligible for a new hire equity grant as well as annual refresh grants
• CA, NY, CT, NJ $128,000 — $142,000 USD
• WA $122,000 — $136,000 USD
• OR, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, RI, VT, DC, PA, VA, CO, TX, IL, HI $118,000 — $131,000 USD
• All other states $106,000 — $118,000 USD