Marketing Knowledge Engineer

Block+Tackle; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Block+Tackle is seeking a Marketing Knowledge Engineer to partner with multinational clients, auditing and governing their semantic layer. You’ll translate business language into precise, structured definitions and design taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs for consistent marketing understanding.

This forward-deployed role puts you in the client environment, defending governance decisions and feeding insights back to evolve the product’s knowledge model and platform.

Qualifications

• Senior-level experience in large, multinational enterprise environments.
• Hands-on experience designing taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, or similar governed information models.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business language into precise, structured definitions and defend them with stakeholders.
• comfortable working directly with clients in forward-deployed settings.
• Based in, or willing to relocate to, Atlanta, GA.

Responsibilities

• Audit, clean up, harden, and govern client semantic layers.
• Design governed concepts, taxonomies, ontologies, rules, and hierarchies for consistent interpretation.
• Build usable knowledge models—operational meaning, not just glossaries.
• Connect business language to technical structure and governance; defend calls with stakeholders.
• Embed as an embedded specialist within the Forward Deployed Marketing Engineering team, in the client's world.
• Feed learnings back into how we represent and govern marketing context as the product evolves.

Skills

Enterprise experience

Taxonomies

Ontologies

Knowledge graphs

Governed information models

Business-language translation

Client collaboration

Tools

RDF

OWL

SKOS

Data governance frameworks

Job description

You may also know this role as: Taxonomist, Information Architect, Ontology Architect, Knowledge Architect, or Semantic Lead — we landed on \"Marketing Knowledge Engineer\" because it's the only one of these that captures what the job actually is.

The Mission

Marketing has a language problem. Every enterprise we work with has a dozen teams, three martech stacks, and a hundred definitions of \"customer,\" \"campaign,\" and \"conversion\" that all quietly disagree with each other. That's not a data quality issue — it's a meaning issue, and it's the reason AI systems trained on that mess produce confident nonsense.

We're building a product to fix that: a context platform that gives people, AI, and every connected system a shared, governed understanding of how marketing actually works. But a platform is only as good as the knowledge model underneath it, and that's where you come in.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with enterprise clients — multinational, matrixed, plenty of legacy baggage — to audit, clean up, harden, and govern their semantic layer.
• Design governed concepts, taxonomies, ontologies, rules, and hierarchies that translate messy real-world business language into structures people, our company, AI, and connected systems can all interpret the same way.
• Build usable knowledge models, not just classification schemes — this is about engineering operational meaning, not maintaining a glossary.
• Connect business language to technical structure and governance, and hold the line when a shortcut today would create chaos in eighteen months.
• Operate as an embedded specialist within our Forward Deployed Marketing Engineering team — you're in the client's world, not reviewing their world from a deck.
• Feed what you learn in the field back into how we represent and govern marketing context as the product evolves.

What You Bring

Must-haves:

• Senior-level experience working inside large, multi-national enterprise organizations. You know how messy, political, and matrixed enterprise data and marketing operations get, because you've lived it — not because you've read about it.
• Real, hands-on experience designing taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs, or comparable governed information models. Maintaining someone else's classification system doesn't count; building one does.
• The ability to translate ambiguous business language into precise, structured, technically usable definitions — and the backbone to defend those calls to stakeholders who each think their team's definition is the correct one.
• Genuine comfort working directly with clients. This is forward-deployed work — you're in the room, not behind the scenes.
• Based in, or willing to relocate to, Atlanta, GA.

Nice-to-haves:

• Background in MarTech, marketing operations, or a marketing/data ecosystem specifically.
• Familiarity with semantic web or knowledge representation approaches (e.g., RDF, OWL, SKOS) or formal enterprise data governance frameworks.
• Experience designing knowledge structures for how AI/LLM systems consume them, not just how a human reads a glossary page.

The Fine Print

• No visa sponsorship available for this role.
• This is new headcount for growth, not a backfill — you'd be defining a lot of what 'good' looks like in this seat.

Why Work Here?

We are what happens when a MarTech consultancy that’s spent over a decade in the trenches with Fortune-scale marketing and data teams decides to build the platform it always wished existed. We’re still a small, fast-moving team backed by Block+Tackle’s \"Special Ops for Marketing Ops\" culture — confident, hands-on, allergic to theory that doesn’t survive contact with a real client environment. If you want to shape the knowledge model at the foundation of a category-defining product instead of inheriting someone else’s spreadsheet of \"official\" definitions, this is that seat.