Lead Data Taxonomist

The New York Times•New York, NY

17d

About The Position

The New York Times is looking for a Lead Data Taxonomist to serve as the architect and steward of our enterprise-wide event taxonomy. The New York Times is home to multiple products across News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic with billions of monthly events. Therefore, the need for a unified, governed, and high-quality data language is critical. In a long-term effort, it will dramatically improve data quality at the New York Times and power real-time recommendation engines, personalization algorithms, and future AI initiatives. You will be responsible for New York Times' global event data catalog and taxonomy. You will sit at the intersection of Product, Data Platform, and Analytics, capturing every interaction — from a Wordle guess to a subscriber payflow — through a standardized, semantic lens. You will report to our Executive Director, Data & Insights.

Requirements

7+ years in Data Taxonomy, Data Ontology, Data Architecture, Technical Product Management, or Digital Analytics Implementation.
5+ years of developing taxonomies and information architecture for front-end and back-end use cases
5+ years of experience with event-cataloging software (e.g., Avo, Iteratively, Segment Protocols, or proprietary internal tools).
Experience managing complex, global event taxonomies for large, multi-product organizations
Expertise with JSON, YAML, and other data modeling languages and tools
Mastery of SQL, Python, and other data wrangling tools and languages
Experience enforcing standards in high-growth, decentralized engineering environments
Applied knowledge of industry-leading data governance, quality, and data management practices and tools

Nice To Haves

Proficiency with GCP, AWS, or other big data environments
Background in subscription or media industries with complex data
Familiarity with Data Contracts and their implementation within a CI/CD workflow.
Master's degree in Library Science, Information Management, or Computer Science.

Responsibilities

You will develop and maintain a multi-domain enterprise taxonomy that includes Behavioral, Commerce, Messaging, User, Session, and other key data domains. This taxonomy will be transferable across all NYT products and codebases.
You will establish and enforce global events, event properties, standard property values, required fields, acceptable value types, and naming conventions. You will own the definition and lifecycle of global events that track the user journey across the entire NYT ecosystem.
You will be the final authority for the taxonomy, approving or rejecting all pull requests and proposals for new events, properties, or changes to the existing taxonomy.
You will oversee the enterprise event catalog, ensuring it serves as a high-fidelity source of truth with accurate business logic and metadata.
You will define and monitor domain-specific KPIs for data quality, security, and integration, solving for systemic issues.
You will iterate with engineers to improve instrumentation capabilities in service of data products
You will collaborate with engineers to align the taxonomy with Kafka infrastructure and with Analytics Engineering to ensure data is designed to flow effortlessly downstream and to help develop our larger New York Times ontology
You will facilitate and provide oversight for data councils concerning events and metrics
You will provide support and training to product and analytics teams to improve and evolve event tracking
You will advocate for information architecture best practices and master data management (MDM) principles across the organization.
Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Benefits

dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock.
Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.

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