Information Architect - Head of Taxonomy in London

The Home Office works to build a safe, fair, and prosperous UK. We achieve this through our work on counterterrorism, policing, crime, drugs policy, immigration, and passports. The Migration and Borders Group is responsible for policy, legislation and reform of the immigration systems and acts as a centre for excellence to deliver international interventions and engagement. This work touches many of the most high-profile policy areas for the Home Office, including asylum, migration, nationality, extradition, citizens’ rights, borders, and international criminality.

The Data Excellence Capability (DEC) is a cross Migration and Borders function to provide data leadership, direction, and drive collaboration across the key system enablers. DEC leads on co-ordinating and directing system wide efforts and data improvements and provides enduring expertise to support the systems immediate needs along with building long term sustainable solutions.

As Head of Taxonomy, you will play a critical role in structuring, organising and governing information to ensure it is easily discoverable, consistent, and aligned with the Migration & Borders (M&B) System Outcomes. You will develop, implement, and advance the strategic approach to a Taxonomy service for M&B System, developing taxonomies and establishing the service offering to support data driven decision making across the department.

We are recruiting for the Head of Taxonomy for Migration and Borders (M&B) in the Data Excellence Capability (DEC), as part of the M&B System Leadership Directorate. This role is pivotal in setting how M&B approaches taxonomy, one of the most complex and highest profile parts of the UK Government. This is a strategic and stretching role. The successful candidate will lead delivering taxonomies and embedding taxonomy best practice in projects across the M&B System, including resolving inconsistencies in terminology, reframing classification structures, identifying and rationalising overlapping hierarchies inherited from legacy systems or siloed business units and aligning/mapping classification standards between internal and external bodies to enable coherent data sharing and reporting.

Key responsibilities

• You will design, implement and manage taxonomies, glossaries, definitions and other metadata for data projects across the M&B system, performing a consultative function to support the varying needs, understanding the complexity of the wider departmental structure and providing stakeholders with guidance, training, lessons learned and recommendations.
• You will address complex, multi-layered challenges that span digital and data services, information management and data standards across M&B. Problems are often novel, and require balancing technical accuracy, user needs, with operational realities.
• You will support data owners in adopting good data management practices by integrating a system-wide taxonomy and reference data service, ensuring consistent classification, improved discoverability, and secure data exchange across the M&B System, generating improvements in data quality.
• You will lead engagement both internally and externally. Internally, you will collaborate with various teams, requiring a high level of diplomacy and the capacity to manage complex relationships effectively to align teams towards common goals. Externally, you will engage with other departments, stakeholders, and the public, facilitating constructive dialogue.
• You will shape the taxonomy strategy and service model for M&B. Our ambition is that working with taxonomies should be a core part of the skills needed in a data-literate organisation.

Essential Criteria

• You will have a demonstrable passion for digital change and adoption, with the following skills or proven experience in:
• Experience in taxonomy development, with the ability to embed changes effectively across a large data architecture. We welcome evidence from professional roles, projects, or academic work.
• Familiarity with taxonomy management tools (e.g., Synaptica, GraphWise, Graphologi) and knowledge in semantic standards (e.g., Simple Knowledge Organisation System, Web Ontology Language and Resource Description Framework or similar).
• Understanding of ontologies and semantic technologies (such as knowledge graphs or semantic layers) and their application to improve data connectivity and meaning.
• Experience working with language technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), machine learning, or generative AI, or the ability to collaborate effectively on projects involving these technologies.
• Effective communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to explain complex topics clearly and inclusively to diverse audiences, including non-specialists and non-technical colleagues. Adapt communication style to meet diverse needs.
• Proven project and relationship management skills, with the ability to work collaboratively across diverse teams and systems to deliver change in a large and complex organisation.

Desirable Criteria

• Ideally you will also have the following skills or some experience in:
• Working with taxonomies in a public sector organisation.
• Migration and borders.

Technical skills

We will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• OR01 - Strong and empowering leadership
• CT01 - Impact of change on the use of information
• IF01 - Information flows.
• IS01 - Managing the information lifecycle in systems
• LI07 - Cataloguing and classifying information

Employer: Home Office (UK Civil Service)

Location: Various Locations, UK

Posted Date: 05/02/2026

Expiry Date: 05/06/2026

Type: Full-Time

Categories: Data / Knowledge Manager / Analysis / Governance, Metadata Management / Taxonomy / Ontology, System Administrator / Integrator, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning