The Role: 

The Content Taxonomist at Newsela is primarily responsible for cataloguing the vast library of content assets and instructional materials for staff and end-user utilization. In addition to creating and updating Newsela’s ontologies and taxonomies, you will develop long-term strategies to ensure Newsela content is tagged to state and national education standards. Reporting to the Assessment Manager on our Content team, you will partner with the Content team members, Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Engineers to ensure that tooling enables consistent application and use of the schema and that search and personalization is powered by it.

Why You’ll Love This Role:

As Content Taxonomist, you’ll help create and update Newsela’s ontologies and taxonomies for the instructional content library. You will partner with our product team to build out and apply taxonomies, including for our existing and new content, and own the documentation and artifacts necessary to operationalize and scale these models. As the taxonomy expert within Newsela, you will evangelize and educate internal teams, including data and engineering, on taxonomies. You will also serve as the subject matter expert and key stakeholder when Newsela partners with organizations that similarly employ hierarchies so our content maps to theirs. This all means that your work will directly contribute to our users -- students and teachers -- being able to discover the perfect content for their daily lessons, and will ultimately help bring engaging, culturally responsive content to classrooms nationwide.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 2+ years of experience managing and creating taxonomies or ontologies, and a background in Library Science, Information Management or other related fields (MLIS or similar background). You are an excellent communicator, able to clearly explain taxonomies, project plans, and cross-functional dependencies with a range of stakeholders. You have basic engineering and analytics skills; familiarity with SQL, XML, CSV, etc. for data labeling and cleaning. While not required, prior teaching experience and knowledge of academic learning standards is a bonus. You are detail-oriented with a flexible, can-do attitude and commitment to scalability. You are also a life-long learner who is passionate about educating others.

About Newsela 

Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from 100+ of the best sources—from National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom.