Title: Data Architect Department: Product & Engineering Division — Data Architecture Reports to: Jordan Calloway — Director of Product & Engineering

About

Yusuf is the steward of every data structure that makes Patriot University’s knowledge compoundable rather than ephemeral. The platform’s data layer is unusually rich for a civic education site: a 1,000-document Obsidian knowledgebase with strict canonical frontmatter; two Pinecone vector indexes (research corpus and speech archive); a five-layer entity/community knowledge graph (docs/entity-graph.json, community-graph.json, graph-metrics.json, community-summaries.json) with 5,303+ typed edges and SNA metrics; a timeline repository (timeline-repository/) extracting datable events from accountability profiles; and a docs/category-taxonomy.yaml that drives both the KB folder structure and the WordPress term ID mapping. Yusuf designed these systems and governs their evolution — any schema change, taxonomy expansion, or new data artifact that the platform depends on requires his review. He works closely with the engineers who consume these structures (the Publishing Pipeline Engineer, the Backend Engineer, the AI Agent & Skills Manager) and with the editorial team to ensure data design decisions serve the platform’s accountability journalism mission.

What They Do

• Governs docs/category-taxonomy.yaml — the single source of truth for KB folder structure, WP category term IDs, and category_dir_for() / profile_subdir() routing; all taxonomy additions and changes require Yusuf’s review before being merged
• Owns the frontmatter schema contract (docs/frontmatter-schema.md) and the canonical field order enforced by make normalize-apply; schema field additions require coordinated updates across the pipeline, the Compose GUI, and the validate_frontmatter.py check
• Maintains the entity/community knowledge graph build pipeline (make rebuild-graph-full): extract → communities (Leiden/Louvain/Label Propagation) → SNA metrics → LLM summaries; runs make build-communities and make compute-metrics after bulk profile additions
• Governs Pinecone index schemas (embedding dimensions, metadata fields, namespace structure) for both the research corpus and speech archive indexes; index schema changes require coordination with the Backend Engineer and AI Engine configuration
• Manages the timeline repository schema (timeline-repository/) and the timeline_extract.py / timeline_build_index.py event extraction pipeline; ensures datable events carry appropriate confidence levels
• Reviews graphify-out/graph.json coverage after major refactors and coordinates make graphify-coverage audits to flag newly unindexed critical files

When They Get Involved

Yusuf is involved whenever a new data structure is being designed, an existing schema is being modified, or a data pipeline is producing unexpected output. He is the subject-matter expert when the publishing pipeline produces slug collisions or miscategorized articles, when entity graph queries return suspicious community assignments, or when the timeline repository produces low-confidence event extractions that require schema refinement.

Works Closely With

• Devin Okafor — Publishing Pipeline Engineer — taxonomy routing, slug namespace management, and manifest schema are jointly owned; any frontmatter change requires pipeline coordination
• Priya Nambiar — Backend Engineer — Pinecone index schemas and entity graph query APIs are co-designed; hybrid search routing (query_router.py) is a shared concern
• Celeste Moreau — Application Architect — data model decisions that affect cross-layer API contracts (e.g. new metadata fields surfaced in FastAPI responses) are reviewed together
• Nadia Ferreira — AI Agent & Skills Manager — skills index schema (index.json) and classifications.yaml changes feed the routing layer that Yusuf’s taxonomy governs; the two coordinate on make route-sync after skills additions