Website Content Specialist

Cato; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 55,000 - 65,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Paid time off

Parental leave

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

The Cato Institute is seeking a Website Content Specialist to manage day-to-day production across our platforms. You will build and update pages, migrate content, and verify results in collaboration with the Senior Website Administrator and digital team.

You will combine hands-on production with AI-assisted efficiency, balancing automation with human judgment to ensure precise, high-quality outputs across our policy-focused content.

Qualifications

• 1-2 years in website administration, CMS content management, digital production, or web editorial work.

Responsibilities

• Website Production & CMS Operations: Build, update, and maintain pages and content; manage metadata, links, images, alt text for SEO and accessibility.
• AI-Assisted Workflows: Use AI tools to draft metadata, format content, tag, and bulk-update; document prompts and workflows.
• Editorial & Quality Control: Review content for accuracy and consistency with style; spot-check automated changes.
• Content Request Intake: Log, prioritize, and track page/content updates with project management tools; escalate questions.
• Documentation & Process Improvement: Propose new workflows and AI-assisted procedures; measure time saved and rework.
• Cross-Functional Support: Coordinate with scholars, program staff, and editors to build pages from CMS components.

Skills

CMS proficiency

AI tool fluency

HTML/CSS basics

Organization & PM

Communication

Production & editorial

Job description

Description

The Website Content Specialist plays a critical role in ensuring that the Cato Institute’s groundbreaking policy work is portrayed to the public accurately and effectively. The Specialist will manage the day-to-day production work of our platforms: building and updating pages, entering and migrating content, and checking the results. You will work with the Senior Website Administrator, and with the wider digital team, to keep projects on schedule and stakeholders informed.

This role sits where hands-on production, AI-assisted efficiency, and editorial judgment meet, requiring a high attention to detail, paired with a desire to create efficient process through AI tools and agents. But there is no AI replacement for human judgment, so you will serve as the human quality check on everything produced. We expect you to know which tasks to hand to a tool, which to do by hand, and how to verify the result either way.

This is a hybrid position based in Washington, DC, reporting to the Senior Director, Web Products. This is a non-exempt role.

The projected salary range for this role is $55,000 to $65,000 per year. Compensation is based on the successful candidate’s educational background, experience, and skills.

About Cato

The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—a think tank—dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues.

Founded in 1977, Cato owes its name to Cato’s Letters, a series of essays published in 18th-century England that presented a vision of a society free from excessive government power. Those essays inspired the architects of the American Revolution. And the simple, timeless principles of that revolution — individual liberty, limited government, and free markets — turn out to be even more powerful in today’s world of global markets and unprecedented access to information than Jefferson or Madison could have imagined. Social and economic freedom is not just the best policy for a free people, it is the indispensable framework for the future.

The Cato Institute is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Responsibilities

• Website Production & CMS Operations: Build, update, and maintain pages, layouts, and content. Maintain metadata, links, images, alt text, and other fields that affect search, accessibility, and sharing.
• AI-Assisted Workflows: Use AI tools and agents to draft metadata, clean and format content, tag and categorize, flag inconsistencies, and handle repetitive bulk updates. Identify routine tasks ripe for automation, document the prompts and workflows that work, and note where they fail.
• Editorial & Quality Control: Review content before and after publication for accuracy and consistency with our style protocols. Catch the errors automated tools introduce or miss, including plausible but incorrect details. Spot-check bulk and automated changes, and route open questions to editors, scholars, or content owners rather than guessing.
• Content Request Intake: Log, prioritize, and track requests for page and content updates using our project management tools, in consultation with the Senior Website Administrator. Escalate technical questions to the Administrator, and keep requesters updated on status.
• Documentation & Process Improvement: Support team-wide adoption of new workflows, AI-assisted procedures, and editorial review checklists. Suggest improvements to recurring processes, and track where new tools save time and where they create rework.
• Cross-Functional Support: Work with scholars, program staff, and department heads to turn page and content requests into finished pages built from standard CMS components, and coordinate with the Senior Website Administrator, the Digital Project Manager, and the Design Director on timing and visual standards.

Requirements

Education and Experience

• Professional Experience: 1-2 years of experience in website administration, CMS content management, digital production, or web editorial work. Internships, freelance work, and relevant coursework count.
• CMS Proficiency: Hands-on experience publishing and managing content in a content management system (Sanity, Drupal, WordPress, or similar). Experience with Sanity or another headless CMS is a plus.
• AI Tool Fluency: Practical experience using AI assistants or similar tools for production or writing tasks, and a clear sense of their limits. You should be able to describe how you check AI output before relying on it.
• Technical Aptitude: Basic HTML and CSS are expected. Comfort learning new web tools quickly and following documented procedures.
• Organization & Project Management: Ability to manage a steady queue of small tasks in a project management tool, set realistic timelines, and give proactive updates.
• Communication: Clear written and verbal communication with technical and nontechnical colleagues, including scholars and editors who may be new to our platform.

Benefits

All Cato employees are offered the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer contribution to a Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Generous vacation and sick leave
• Paid parental leave
• Employer-provided life and disability insurance
• 401(k) with employer match
• Transit/Parking benefits
• Pet discount plan

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. This position does not offer visa sponsorship.