Taxonomist

Why Hearst Magazines

Hearst Magazines is one of the largest publishers in the world with more than 25 brands including Cosmopolitan ELLEELLE Decor Womens Health Esquire Mens Health Good Housekeeping Harpers BAZAAR House Beautiful Popular Mechanics Oprah Daily and Veranda. We reach more than 150 million people every month in the United States alone.

But were more than just our magazines. We engage our audience across all mediums and channelsprint digital video and socialwith sophisticated content creation distribution and data capabilities. We create package and sell products with cuttingedge technology and proprietary platforms. Together we are reinventing publishing for the 21st century.

Your Impact

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 AIdriven 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.

What Youll 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 onsite 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• Fix inconsistent or outdated categorization in existing content.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 adcontent alignment.
• Collaborate with other taxonomists particularly those focused on product taxonomy to ensure consistent approaches across the organization.

Who You Are

• 57 years experience in taxonomy development metadata management or ontology design within digital publishing commerce or AIdriven environments.
• Ability to apply ontology concepts to improve contextual ad targeting commerce integrations and AIdriven 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 crossfunctionally 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.
• Handson experience with AI NLP or machine learning models for content classification and tagging.
• Formal education in information science library science or computational linguistics.

The basesalaryfor this role is between $149000$ actual base pay offered is dependent upon many factors such as: transferable skills work experience business needs and market demands. The base payrangeis 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.