Senior Information Specialist

Senior Information Specialist

Category:
Architecture

Main location:
United States, Virginia, Fairfax

Position : J

Employment Type:

Full Time

If you thrive at the intersection of information architecture, strategy, and governance, this position offers the chance to shape how mission critical scientific and technical knowledge is organized, accessed, and preserved. As a Senior Information Specialist, you’ll take the lead in developing enterprise level taxonomies and metadata frameworks, maturing content ecosystems, guiding digital preservation, and establishing data governance and compliance standards.

You’ll partner closely with business and technical stakeholders to design sustainable structures and processes that strengthen discoverability, improve consistency, and ensure long term stewardship. Your work will have enterprise wide impact—supporting informed decision making, creating organizational clarity, and enabling deeper insight through well structured information.

• Design, develop, and maintain taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, code sets, and glossaries that support enterprise wide content organization and interoperability.
• Establish metadata frameworks, schemas, crosswalks, and governance standards to unify how content is defined, described, and classified across systems.
• Lead efforts to mature content repositories, including structure, workflows, configuration, and lifecycle management (creation, curation, archival, preservation).
• Serve as a task level lead and system administrator for enterprise terminology and vocabulary management platforms, ensuring quality, consistency, and adoption.
• Drive accessibility compliance efforts for information assets, ensuring alignment with Section 508/WCAG principles and embedding accessibility considerations into content practices and system requirements.
• Oversee digital preservation strategies, including risk assessments, format guidance, and preservation metadata to ensure long term sustainability of content.
• Develop data management templates, standards, and best practice documents to guide consistent, high quality content creation and metadata application.
• Conduct requirements gathering activities with stakeholders, converting business needs into information models, governance policies, and technical specifications.
• Create and manage documentation that supports system configuration, governance decisions, definitions, and information architecture rationale.
• Lead quantitative metrics development to measure content quality, metadata completeness, repository usage, search performance, and governance effectiveness.
• Synthesize metrics into meaningful insights and recommendations for executives and system owners.
• Support cross functional teams with expert consultation on information architecture, content strategy, and metadata utilization.
• Coordinate with system administrators, data architects, and business owners to ensure enterprise search, content repositories, and data platforms rely on consistent and optimized metadata structures.
• Maintain awareness of industry trends—metadata standards, information governance practices, semantic technologies, and digital preservation methodologies—and integrate relevant advancements.

• 10+ years of experience in information science, knowledge management, metadata architecture, or related domains.
• Demonstrated mastery of taxonomy development, controlled vocabulary design, and metadata modelling at enterprise scale.
• Experience architecting metadata schemas, application profiles, mappings, and crosswalks; strong familiarity with recognised metadata standards and best practices.
• Proven ability to design or improve content repositories, content lifecycle models, and semantic search–enabling structures.
• Experience administering enterprise terminology or vocabulary management platforms.
• Strong background in accessibility compliance, including remediation planning and standards interpretation.
• Expertise in digital preservation, including preservation metadata, risk analysis, sustainability of digital formats, and archival workflows.
• Exp…