Job description
We’re transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers.
Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table.
Instacart is a Flex First team
There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work.
Overview
The Taxonomy team sits within the Catalog Engineering organization. We partner with Catalog Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Machine Learning (ML) to maximize the coverage and quality of taxonomy data. The taxonomy is our multi-level categorization structure that products are classified into (e.g. Food > Snacks > Cookies > …) that’s foundational to powering customer experiences like Search, Browse, Ads, and Product Replacements.
About the Job
As a Taxonomist, you’ll play a pivotal role in ensuring accurate product categorization, improving taxonomy structures, and scaling taxonomy solutions in partnership with ML.
About the Role
- 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.
About You
Minimum Qualifications
- 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.
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.
#LI-Remote
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. Please review our Flex First remote work policy here.
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. Please read more about our benefits offerings here.
For US based candidates, the base pay ranges for a successful candidate are listed below.
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
