Associate Director of Product Classification

About the role

YipitData is expanding its Data team within the Corporate practice to welcome a Director of Product Classification to help deliver the most accurate category insights to Retail and Brands clients.

Responsibilities

• Own operational leadership and accountability for the Product Classification organization
• Build and own the metrics framework that holds every team member accountable for classification accuracy, throughput, and quality
• Establish clear performance standards, SLAs, and escalation paths across the Data Classification and Data Quality teams
• Run a rigorous operating cadence — standups, reviews, retrospectives — that surfaces issues early and drives continuous improvement
• Recruit, train, and develop a high-performing classification team
• Hire and onboard Data Classification Analysts who are obsessed with accurate outcomes and hungry to deeply learn what clients need in each category
• Build and scale your team, ensuring they can execute consistently on well-defined processes
• Create onboarding programs, training curricula, and knowledge bases that accelerate ramp time and reduce institutional knowledge risk
• Ensure analysts own the LLM prompt for each category, continuously refining prompts based on error patterns and client feedback
• Oversee the creation of scalable analytic checks that detect patterns of potential errors that neither the LLM nor manual checking can catch
• Ensure the team builds and maintains rules based on deep category expertise — key products, franchises, brands, and how they should be categorized
• Create an environment where Data Classification analysts are empowered to go deep — learning the nuances of client needs, franchise structures, brand hierarchies, and how products should be categorized
• Champion knowledge sharing across the team so that expertise scales beyond individual contributors
• Maintain excellent cross-functional relationships with Engineering, Insights, and Data to drive our mapping capabilities further. Partner with the Product Manager on system architecture and roadmap
• Work closely with the PM (who owns the classification system architecture and vision) to ensure operational feasibility and team readiness for new initiatives
• Provide ground-level feedback on what's working, what's breaking, and where the biggest accuracy gaps exist to inform the PM's roadmap
• Ensure seamless handoff between the PM's process design and the team's execution
• Leverage AI to accelerate and improve our classification systems to be faster and more accurate
• Possibly partner with Engineering and the PM to continuously improve LLM-driven classification, using the team's domain expertise to train and evaluate models
• Identify opportunities where AI/automation can replace or augment manual work and lead the operational transition
• Stay current on advancements in NLP, LLMs, and classification technology to inform team strategy

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data analytics, data operations, category mapping, or consulting, with at least 4+ years leading teams of 10+, and at least 2 years of experience managing team leaders
• 2+ years of experience working with SQL, Python, PySpark, or other programming languages to explore and transform large, complex datasets; Familiarity with GitHub and Databricks
• An operational excellence mindset — you build systems, metrics, and processes that scale. You hold people accountable without micromanaging
• A proven track record of hiring great talent, building training programs, and developing leaders within your team
• Comfortable with ambiguity and building from scratch — this is a team-building role. You'll be creating structure, not inheriting it
• The ability to clearly communicate complex concepts, both orally and in writing
• A strong ownership mentality and enthusiasm for making a big impact at a rapidly growing company