Senior Information Architect
Imagine Learning
Introduction
Want to have a positive impact on the world? At Imagine Learning, we change the lives of K-12 students and open doors of opportunity by serving students with the industry’s best language, literacy, and math software. We’re an ed-tech industry leader and growing fast.
As an Information Architect, you’ll be part of a team of information design professionals within Imagine Learning’s Product Experience Design (PXD) group, working with product designers, UX researchers, content designers, and learning experience designers to thoughtfully create effective, organized, intuitive information experiences for school administrators, educators, technologists, parents, and students. You’ll bring a strong semantic and technical skillset to a wide variety of problems, tools, and environments to create efficient, scalable, and sustainable structured information solutions across the enterprise.
As an Information Architect, you’ll own the architecture and delivery of information across Imagine Learning product suites. You’ll collaborate with engineers, product managers, and other members of the Product Experience Design group to design information models that connect authoring, publishing, delivery that reflect multiple user personas. You’ll tackle our most difficult problems and work with a high degree of ambiguity, designing models that deliver best-in-class user experiences, maximize engineering deliverables, and minimize authoring and production effort. You’ll need to be a self-starter who is passionate about designing information structures that meet complex requirements and anticipate future needs.
Part-technologist and part-taxonomist, you’ll lead out on identifying IA requirements and initiate discussions with software and curriculum architects to develop scalable information structures in a variety of environments. That might mean designing tables in a headless CMS to contain structured information for automated assembly, working with developers to design reporting information that’s clear and easy for users to comprehend, or creating information models that Content Designers can follow and populate. You’ll identify critical pieces of metadata, then design forward-facing taxonomies to categorize and label content for machine and human consumption. You’ll also follow best practices for taxonomy governance and maintenance, including managing metadata and other standards within the information ecosystem. You’ll visualize those taxonomies and policies to help mature our overall product architecture, provide transparency into individual product implementations, enhance our internal tools, and communicate our information architecture across the organization.
About Us
Weld North Education (WNE) is a leading digital education technology company focused on developing digital curriculum and tools for K-12 students. At WNE, we focus on building the best digital curriculum capabilities and resources to enable teachers, administrators, parents, and students to benefit from innovative technologies designed to maximize potential. Our teams are creating the future of integrated curriculum and assessments to transform the way teachers teach and students learn.
A Day in the Life as a Senior Information Architect
- Define and implement best-practice information architecture strategy and taxonomy development across the Imagine Learning product line. Provide thought leadership for IA and taxonomy adoption, combined with clear tactical timelines, costs, and risks.
- Contribute to the overall information design ecosystem, including conceptual modeling, visualization, alignment across products and platforms for consistency and completeness, and deployment.
- Work across multiple products and teams to standardize and operationalize Imagine Learning’s approach to information architecture, design, and deployment.
- Engage with stakeholders, product owners, and cross-functional team members to identify IA needs and requirements across the Imagine Learning product line.
- Design and implement information models, templates, and rubrics for consistent and efficient information delivery. Use a variety of industry-standard frameworks and methodologies such as single-sourcing, multi-channeling publishing, and modular writing to reuse content efficiently across different outputs and platforms.
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, product designers, content designers, UX researchers, and others to ensure that Imagine Learning’s information architecture and content strategy helps drive the company’s desired UX, business, and technical outcomes.
- Work with the Design Operations team to develop guiding principles, standards, training, and hiring practices for the Information Architecture and Design team.
- Establish best practices and structural guidelines for taxonomy and metadata definition and management. Educate stakeholders, coordinate taxonomy work across cross-functional teams, and drive continuous improvements to enterprise taxonomy practice.
- Identify, analyze, and troubleshoot end-to-end data design and implementation problems using strategies like information modeling, metadata management, single sourcing, and other best practices. Actively champion improvements to Imagine Learning’s approach to information architecture ecosystem.
- Make decisions and take action thoughtfully and quickly; be comfortable, flexible, and decisive in ambiguity.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Technical Communication, Content Management, Information Management, Library Science, or relevant discipline; Master’s degree preferred.
- 8+ years of experience in an Information Architect or Content Strategy/Content Development role, specifically designing and developing information architecture for large-scale content solutions using a variety of front-end and back-end platforms.
- Experience taking the lead in shaping content direction for multi-disciplinary projects.
- Ability to translate business needs into long-term IA solutions, and evangelize solutions by presenting IA concepts and deliverables in a compelling and convincing manner.
- Proven track record of bringing a strong IA presence to multi-disciplinary projects and effectively influencing others through teamwork and diplomacy.
- Proven ability to design and implement detailed content models and information architecture that delivers reliable, scalable solutions and anticipates future needs.
- Experience developing flow diagrams, schema, and other artifacts to communicate and visualize information management strategy and principles to non-IA team members.
- Demonstrated experience producing, managing, and deploying content across multiple channels using headless content management systems.
- Knowledge of relational databases, SQL, AWS, JSON, or other data structures, management tools, and environments that support enterprise content management and delivery efforts.
- Demonstrated experience with HTML, XML, or DITA and a variety of enterprise-wide content management systems that support content authoring efforts.
- Experience writing outstanding UI microcopy that improves navigation, on-boarding, error messages, and other areas of the end-to-end user experience
- Experience designing, implementing, and refining metadata schema and policy for use across multiple products.
- Exceptional collaboration, listening, written, and verbal communication skills demonstrated in the ability to identify obstacles, articulate technical and semantic requirements and dependencies, and initiate technology strategy and architecture conversations with management, business, and technology stakeholders.
- Experience working in an Agile environment, including using JIRA to manage IA efforts, and Confluence to document models and implementation details.
- Experience working with UX best practices, such as design thinking, usability testing, responsive web design, etc.
Perks of the Job
- Purpose. Do something more than just make money. We impact the lives of millions of kids through education.
- Company security and growth. We're privately owned by Weld North Education and Silver Lake Partners, a private equity group specializing in scaling companies, which has $39 billion in combined assets under management and committed capital. Their current investment portfolio includes large, high-profile companies like Alibaba Group, Tesla, Ancestry, SoFi, Dell Technologies, GoDaddy, SolarWinds, Symantec, and us!
- Competitive Salary.
- Benefits: medical, dental, vision, retirement savings, and wellness benefits for you and dependents.
- Recovery time: Paid vacations, holidays, and a yearly schedule built around educators.
- Culture: Quarterly team activities, and the most genuine and fun coworkers you'll ever have.
Compensation and Benefits
We offer competitive salaries and benefit choices. Our health & welfare benefits provide full-time employees both choice and value to meet the needs of our diverse workforce. We offer multiple health, dental, and vision plans to choose from including accident/critical illness insurance, pet insurance, identity protection, and others. We also provide (at no cost to employees) life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO, holidays, volunteer time off, and paid bonding leave, among others. We contribute to an employee's 401(k) and HSA account. And to support professional growth, we offer multiple training and development programs through our in-house university.
Equal Opportunity Employer
WNE is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to a diverse workforce, providing equal employment and advancement opportunities to all qualified individuals. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
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