Taxonomist/Ontologist

Taxonomist – E-commerce / Ontologist

Location: Remote UK based

Contract Duration: Until end of year

Working Hours: 40 hours per week

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Taxonomist to support large-scale e-commerce and catalog initiatives within a global product organization. This role focuses on enriching, normalizing, and governing product metadata (e.g. Brand, Category attributes) within a unified taxonomy to support machine learning systems and downstream product experiences.

You will work closely with cross-functional partners including engineers, product teams, and US-based stakeholders, contributing directly to data quality, ML understanding, and scalable taxonomy design.

Key Responsibilities

• Perform detailed data analysis using Excel, Google Sheets, and/or scripting tools to identify exact and fuzzy matches across multiple vocabularies
• Research internal and external sources to enrich and define taxonomy metadata
• Normalize product metadata and implement updates based on taxonomy governance standards
• Support cross-taxonomy mapping, vertical expansion, and front-end taxonomy design
• Collaborate with engineers to support machine learning classification, including annotation and model output evaluation
• Provide clear status reporting on progress, risks, questions, and opportunities to stakeholders
• Work closely with global partners, including teams based in the US

Minimum Requirements

• 2+ years’ experience developing taxonomies and/or ontologies for front-end and back-end systems
• Hands-on experience building taxonomies for e-commerce or product catalogs
• Strong experience researching, defining, and managing taxonomy metadata using existing standards
• Experience working across a variety of topic or domain types
• Ability to clearly communicate and present taxonomy principles and standards
• High attention to detail with a strong affinity for structured taxonomy work
• Proactive, self-starting mindset with strong ownership and stakeholder communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Library Science, Information Management, or a related field
• Experience working with SQL or other query languages on large datasets
• Experience building taxonomies for machine learning or classification systems
• Familiarity with AI tools and prompt engineering
• Linguistic background and/or additional language skills

What Makes This Role Interesting

• Work on a highly niche taxonomy function with direct impact on large-scale e-commerce and machine learning initiatives
• Exposure to complex catalog systems used at global scale
• Opportunity to collaborate closely with experienced taxonomy, data, and engineering professionals
• Strong visibility of your work across product and ML teams