CS Taxonomy and Ontology Manager

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way. The Community You Will Join: The Content and Knowledge Management (CKM) team writes, edits, and manages support content and metadata that are used by Airbnb customers, CS and GO ambassadors, consuming applications, and other audiences. The Help Center, Knowledge Center (as well as localized versions for CJK), Macros repository, and Contact Reasons taxonomy are some of the primary knowledge bases CKM maintains. The Difference You Will Make: The Taxonomy / Ontology Manager (TOM) will guide Airbnb’s Community Support (CS) Taxonomy team to shape and manage scalable taxonomies, ontologies, and other structured data. This role reports directly to the head of Content and Knowledge Management (CKM) and sits within the Service Enablement organization for CS. Working in close collaboration with cross-functional partners, the TOM supports the taxonomist / ontologist function both in CS and across the company, providing guidance and strategic thought leadership across taxonomy, ontology, metadata management, information architecture, and knowledge modeling needs. A Typical Day: Management Collaborate with leadership in the development of long-term, sustainable strategic initiatives Provide leadership, coaching, and professional guidance to Taxonomist / Ontologists General people management and administrative activities as member of CKM and Service Enablement leadership teams Lead strategy related to taxonomy, ontology, information architecture, metadata management, labeling/cataloging projects, and knowledge modeling within Airbnb’s CS organization Consult with CS stakeholders to support Knowledge Management (KM) strategy, grounded LLMs, and data-driven community support Collaborate closely with leadership external to CS (Data Management, Infra, etc.) to develop sustainable, scalable solutions for semantic data at Airbnb Guide the development of the Taxonomist / Ontologist career function at Airbnb Partner closely with Product / Eng to develop Airbnb’s enterprise Taxonomy / Ontology Platform Represent Taxonomy / Ontology function at a leadership level General Support day-to-day operations for ongoing taxonomy and ontology governance across use cases Work with product teams to build comprehensive frontend and backend taxonomies for cataloging assets in a natural, interpretable manner Manage datasets and preparation of imports / exports / custom reporting for stakeholders Reconcile disparate taxonomies and recommend semantic structures for unstructured data sets, whether discovered or predetermined Create and maintain clear documentation for training and governance related to information management activities Work with engineering, analytics, and insights teams to develop and improve machine learning models and labeling practices Collaborate with cross-functional partners to triage data issues related to semantic data Collaborate with subject matter experts across various domains to identify and define appropriate use cases for semantic data projects Communicate complex technical information clearly and effectively to multi-functional audiences at varying levels of technical expertise or understanding Identify opportunities for improvement and make recommendations to mature processes Foster communication, cooperation, and alignment among distributed internal stakeholders Evangelize the importance and value of semantic data work Your Expertise: Experience developing taxonomies, ontologies, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies Experience improving, maturing, and iterating on existing information structures, including consolidation or reconciliation across ... (truncated, view full listing at source)