Product Manager, Data Products

impact; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

impact.com is seeking a Technical Product Manager to own the foundational data layer powering benchmarking, classification, and personalization systems. You will manage taxonomy ecosystems spanning partner, brand, product, and content classification, with responsibility for data quality and production readiness.

In this hands-on role you will work inside the dbt/pull-request workflow with engineering, apply data governance, and translate taxonomy insights into concrete recommendations for

Qualifications

• 4+ years in a technical Product Management, data Product Management, or data governance role, with direct ownership of a taxonomy or classification system at scale.
• Working fluency in SQL and demonstrated comfort operating inside a dbt workflow.
• Demonstrated experience designing or maintaining a taxonomy or classification system.
• Experience with BigQuery and/or SingleStore, or similar warehouse-to-serving-layer promotion patterns.
• Strong written documentation habits for taxonomy decisions.
• Comfort with ambiguity in messy, real-world data.
• Bachelor's in a quantitative field; Master's/PhD preferred.

Responsibilities

• Taxonomy design & maintenance for partners, brands, products, and content.
• Design and maintain the GEO prompt category taxonomy.
• Build proprietary product taxonomies for verticals not covered by GMC.
• Own the action tracker taxonomy and audience segmentation taxonomy.
• Collaborate with experts to refine taxonomy definitions and adapt structures as new entity types emerge.
• Data quality audits across systems and entity types.
• Define and track data quality KPIs and drive remediation.
• Prototype-to-production pipeline co-ownership (BigQuery to SingleStore).
• Review schema changes and coordinate promotion timing with engineering.
• Ensure taxonomy work is production-ready and maintainable.

Skills

SQL

Data governance

Taxonomy design

dbt workflow

BigQuery

SingleStore

Education

Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering)

Tools

dbt workflow

BigQuery

SingleStore

Job description

About impact.com

impact.com is the world's leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products- Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)-unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L'Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

About the Role

We're seeking a Technical Product Manager to own the foundational data layer that powers our benchmarking, recommendation, classification, and personalization systems. In this role, you'll own the operational and structural integrity of our taxonomy ecosystem - spanning partner/brand/product/content classification, proprietary vertical taxonomies, and the pipeline discipline that gets new taxonomies safely into production. This is a role that demands precision, technical fluency, and comfort with ambiguity in messy real-world data - not roadmap ownership for external-facing products. You'll spend your time in classification logic, data quality audits, and the mechanics of promoting data assets from prototype (BigQuery) to production (SingleStore), working directly inside the dbt-and-pull-request workflow alongside engineering. Your work will directly influence the accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness of the data foundation that every downstream product (search, scoring, recommendations, reporting) depends on.

Core Responsibilities

• Taxonomy design & maintenance - Own and evolve classification structures for partners, brands, products, and content.
• Design and maintain the GEO prompt category taxonomy.
• Build proprietary product taxonomies for verticals not covered by Google Merchant Center - financial services, B2B, and travel.
• Own the action tracker taxonomy and audience segmentation taxonomy.
• Collaborate with category and domain experts to refine taxonomy definitions, resolve edge cases, and adapt structures as new entity types emerge.
• Data quality & hygiene - Conduct deep-dive audits into taxonomy coverage, consistency, and correctness across systems and entity types.
• Define and track data quality KPIs (classification accuracy, coverage gaps, taxonomy drift, schema compliance) and drive remediation when they slip.
• Root-cause and resolve systematic misclassification issues at scale, not just one-off tickets.
• Build monitoring and alerting to proactively surface taxonomy or data quality degradation before it reaches downstream consumers.
• Prototype-to-production pipeline (co-owned) - Co-own the developer playbook for promoting new taxonomies, metrics, and data outputs from prototype (BigQuery) to production (SingleStore).
• Work directly inside the pull-request workflow - reviewing schema changes, validating classification logic, and coordinating promotion timing with engineering.
• Ensure new taxonomy work is production-ready: documented, tested, versioned, and maintainable by others after you've moved on to the next thing.
• Insights & stakeholder communication - Translate taxonomy and data quality findings into clear, actionable recommendations for engineering, DS, and business stakeholders.
• Build and maintain reporting on taxonomy health and coverage across verticals.
• Partner with data producers and consumers to resolve classification conflicts and taxonomy ambiguity.

Requirements

• 4+ years in a technical Product Management, data Product Management, or data governance role, with direct ownership of a taxonomy or classification system at scale.
• Working fluency in SQL and demonstrated comfort operating inside a dbt workflow - reading models, understanding lineage, reviewing pull requests. You don't need to write production dbt code daily, but you can't be intimidated by it.
• Demonstrated experience designing or maintaining a taxonomy or classification system, ideally across multiple verticals or entity types.
• Experience with BigQuery and/or SingleStore, or similar warehouse-to-serving-layer promotion patterns.
• Strong written documentation habits - taxonomy decisions need to be legible to engineering, DS, and downstream consumers, not just to you.
• Comfort with ambiguity in messy, real-world data - you find edge cases interesting, not annoying.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.

Preferred / Nice to have

• Experience with GMC (Google Merchant Center) taxonomy or si