Product Manager, Data Products

About this role

<h2>About impact.com</h2> <p><a href="http://impact.com/">impact.com</a> 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, <a href="http://impact.com/">impact.com</a> empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—<strong>Performance</strong> (affiliate), <strong>Creator</strong> (influencer), and <strong>Advocate</strong> (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, <a href="http://impact.com/">impact.com</a> 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 <a href="http://impact.com/">impact.com</a> to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.</p> <h2>About the Role</h2> <p>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.</p> <h2>Core Responsibilities</h2> <p><strong>Taxonomy design &amp; maintenance</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own and evolve classification structures for partners, brands, products, and content.</li> <li>Design and maintain the GEO prompt category taxonomy.</li> <li>Build proprietary product taxonomies for verticals not covered by Google Merchant Center — financial services, B2B, and travel.</li> <li>Own the action tracker taxonomy and audience segmentation taxonomy.</li> <li>Collaborate with category and domain experts to refine taxonomy definitions, resolve edge cases, and adapt structures as new entity types emerge.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Data quality &amp; hygiene</strong></p> <ul> <li>Conduct deep-dive audits into taxonomy coverage, consistency, and correctness across systems and entity types.</li> <li>Define and track data quality KPIs (classification accuracy, coverage gaps, taxonomy drift, schema compliance) and drive remediation when they slip.</li> <li>Root-cause and resolve systematic misclassification issues at scale, not just one-off tickets.</li> <li>Build monitoring and alerting to proactively surface taxonomy or data quality degradation before it reaches downstream consumers.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Prototype-to-production pipeline (co-owned)</strong></p> <ul> <li>Co-own the developer playbook for promoting new taxonomies, metrics, and data outputs from prototype (BigQuery) to production (SingleStore).</li> <li>Work directly inside the pull-request workflow — reviewing schema changes, validating classification logic, and coordinating promotion timing with engineering.</li> <li>Ensure new taxonomy work is production-ready: documented, tested, versioned, and maintainable by others after you've moved on to the next thing.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Insights &amp; stakeholder communication</strong></p> <ul> <li>Translate taxonomy and data quality findings into clear, actionable recommendations for engineering, DS, and business stakeholders.</li> <li>Build and maintain reporting on taxonomy health and coverage across verticals.</li> <li>Partner with data producers and consumers to resolve classification conflicts and taxonomy ambiguity.</li> </ul> <h2>Requirements:</h2> <h3>Required</h3> <ul> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> <li>Demonstrated experience designing or maintaining a taxonomy or classification system, ideally across multiple verticals or entity types.</li> <li>Experience with BigQuery and/or SingleStore, or similar warehouse-to-serving-layer promotion patterns.</li> <li>Strong written documentation habits — taxonomy decisions need to be legible to engineering, DS, and downstream consumers, not just to you.</li> <li>Comfort with ambiguity in messy, real-world data — you find edge cases interesting, not annoying.&nbsp;</li> <li>Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.</li> </ul> <h3>Preferred / Nice to have</h3> <ul> <li>Experience with GMC (Google Merchant Center) taxonomy or similar commerce/product classification standards.</li> <li>Background in a marketplace, affiliate, or partner-ecosystem business where multi-sided classification (advertisers/publishers/products) is core.</li> <li>Familiarity with entity resolution, deduplication, or classification modeling concepts (you don't need to build the models, but you need to speak the language with the DS team that does).</li> <li>Exposure to master data management (MDM) or data governance practices.</li> </ul> <h2>What sets you apart</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Taxonomy obsession</strong>: You care deeply about classification correctness and understand how a sloppy taxonomy cascades into bad recommendations, bad reporting, and eroded trust downstream.</li> <li><strong>Operational rigor over roadmap glamour</strong>: You get more satisfaction from a clean audit and a correctly resolved edge case than from a shiny new feature launch.</li> <li><strong>Pipeline fluency</strong>: You're not afraid of dbt, PRs, or the prototype-to-production handoff — you see it as core to the job, not someone else's problem.</li> <li><strong>Detective instincts</strong>: You love digging into messy classification data, finding systemic patterns, and tracing root causes rather than patching symptoms.</li> <li><strong>Stakeholder fluency without scope creep</strong>: You can translate technical taxonomy work for non-technical stakeholders while staying disciplined about what is and isn't in your lane.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Benefits and Perks:&nbsp;</strong></h2> <p>At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.</p> <ul> <li><strong>Flexible Working: </strong>Our<strong> Responsible PTO policy</strong> means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.</li> <li><strong>Health and Wellness: </strong>Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to<strong> 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year</strong>, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a <strong>monthly gym reimbursement</strong> policy to support your physical health.</li> <li><strong>A Stake in Our Growth:</strong> We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.</li> <li><strong>Investing in Your Growth: </strong>We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.</li> <li><strong>Parental Support: </strong>We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.</li> <li><strong>Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses</strong></li> </ul> <p><strong><em>impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. </em></strong><em>All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.</em></p>

LOCATION

Cape Town, Western Cape

WORK MODE

On-site

JOB TYPE

Not specified

POSTED

05 Oct 2026

Source: impact.com Careers