LivePerson is a transformational force in how brands and consumers communicate. With over 18,000 brands, including HSBC, Disney, Verizon, and Home Depot, we are on a mission to make life easier for people and brands everywhere through trusted Conversational AI. We believe in a future where conversations are the norm for getting your intentions fulfilled - whatever they are.  

We are an innovative, intent-driven company that believes in building the future and we are looking for growth minded, unconventional thinkers, developers and builders to join the team.

You will thrive here if: 

You can operate in a fast paced, dynamic environment

You can build partnerships that move our business forward

You build code that is simple, understandable, and clean  

You see feedback or failure as motivation to learn and to grow 

You believe data-driven decision making is the norm

You relate to our core principles (link) and want to work with Conversational AI experts

This role will be part of our Taxonomy team, within the Data Science and Analytics organization under Live Person’s Chief Scientist. This person's job would be to create and manage taxonomies and ontologies for classifying messages and events in conversational commerce. These classifications will include, but not be limited to, intents, entities, dialog acts and their relationships to business objectives, agent workflows, customer service and problem resolution. These conceptual frameworks will be an anchor point for product strategy, ML modeling, bot and automation technology, and analytics and reporting.  The right candidate will combine data-driven and foundational approaches to deliver an understanding that is faithful to how people use our systems today, but also helps us identify key undeserved intents. This is a unique and wide-ranging problem, so we are looking for a senior candidate who is capable of working to define deliverables, shape outcomes and lead teams toward successful results. The candidate must be able to thrive in a flat, fast-moving environment that relies on lightweight processes to deliver huge impact.

In this role you will:

• Consumer to brand intents--what are the core categorizations/hierarchies of consumer needs for specific brands or marketplace verticals, and how do they map to a consumer-centric reference frame?
• Develop and apply in-depth expertise for how our customers perceive and think about products, their classification and attributes in order to search for them, including researching and modeling product categories and attribute nuances across different locales
• Synthesizing behavioral data, brand-developed categorizations and foundational methodologies into coherent, actionable and testable taxonomies and ontologies.
• Developing and integrating knowledge assets with machine learning systems, product and marketing teams and downstream production services
• Working with scientists to develop and implement measurement strategies to validate and improve your model
• Provide guidance about ontologies and semantic representations, supporting recommendations with data
• Analyze and optimize processes, owning data integrity and taxonomy effectiveness

We are looking for an expert with experience in:

• 7+ years experience developing and managing taxonomies and ontologies, preferably in the conversational commerce space
• Experience using taxonomy management systems to maintain categories, attributes, and other metadata
• Ontology development and information domain modeling experience
• Experience evangelizing and making business cases for investment in ontology infrastructure, databases and UI
• Experience with researching and integrating third party taxonomy and ontology management systems
• Proven experience presenting technical and metadata information to technical and non-technical audiences
• Proven experience managing multiple projects and delivering results within customer-focused, cross-functional teams
• Experience thinking at a high level about product strategy and vision
• Experience in building and shipping taxonomy and ontology features for e-commerce websites, or software
• A portfolio or other work samples showing e-commerce taxonomy work
• Experience partnering with data science, product management, engineering, and external clients
• Experience with annotation workflows, training, instructions and resource management, both internal and crowd sourced

Your qualifications are:

• Experience planning and developing user intent taxonomies and structured metadata for large user intent catalogs, and crafting information interactions.
• Experience in planning for user intent reuse, adaptive user intent strategy, and user intent personalization architecture.
• Understanding of tools for building and leading taxonomy and metadata; ability to work with tools engineers to build support for taxonomy and metadata requirements into the user intent strategy, authoring, and analytics tools.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills, consistent with a customer focus and a deep understanding of the content and of business needs.
• Experience with market research, audience targeting, competitive analysis, analytics tools, and usability testing.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity, shifting priorities, communicating and partnering with technical and non-technical, internal and external stakeholders at every level of an organization
• Strong writing, speaking and presentation skills; able to communicate complex ideas in an understandable and engaging way
• An understanding of support contact center processes and the application of knowledge and communications within them.
• Experience with Excel, G Suite, SQL

Preferred Skills:

• Master’s Degree in Library Science or Information Management, or equivalent business experience
• 7+ years experience developing and managing user taxonomies and ontologies for business
• 7+ years of information architecture experience
• Experience with large datasets spanning multiple industries and domains
• Programming or scripting experience
• Background in data science
• Metadata design experience
• Product/UX content strategy experience

Why you’ll love working here:

LivePerson was named to Fast Company’s World’s most innovative companies of 2020 list for the Artificial Intelligence category. We offer top tier tech & data science colleagues, along with opportunities to push your own limits. We embrace invention and experimentation. You’ll have great benefits, flexible time off, plus snacks and drinks to keep your mind fresh and stomach full. Most importantly, you’ll have an ability to make an impact at work and at brands across the globe as we build the future with trusted Conversational AI together.

At LivePerson, people from diverse backgrounds come together to do their best work and be their authentic selves. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. 

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.