Senior Technical SEO & AI Search Engineer

Senior Technical SEO & AI Search Engineer

Structured Data, On-Page SEO & Generative Search

**Type of work:** Full-time, remote
**Hours:** 40 hours per week
**Schedule:** Must overlap with our U.S. Central Time team for at least four business hours each weekday.
**Long-term role:** Yes

MF Digital is a U.S.-based digital marketing firm serving graduate and professional education programs, especially law, engineering, and business schools.

We are hiring a senior technical SEO and AI Search engineer to become the execution owner for high-stakes website optimization work across university program pages.

This is not a general SEO assistant, content-writing, backlink-building, social-media, or virtual-assistant role.

You will turn SEO and AI-search strategy into accurate, implementation-ready work: page specifications, schema markup, technical tickets, CMS deployment guidance, and live-site QA. You will work closely with our U.S.-based strategy, content, analytics, and operations teams. This role is not client-facing.

## What You Will Own

### 1. On-Page SEO and AI Search Specifications

You will create detailed, page-level optimization documents for graduate-program websites.

This includes:

* Keyword and search-intent analysis for individual degree pages
* Competitive page teardown and gap analysis
* Title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, H2s, and page hierarchy
* Recommendations for answer-first content blocks, FAQs, comparison content, tuition/value sections, outcomes, faculty authority, and admissions information
* Internal-linking recommendations that strengthen program-level authority
* Calls-to-action and conversion-path recommendations for organic visitors
* Fact-checking requirements for rankings, tuition, credits, outcomes, certification claims, deadlines, and career data
* Clear implementation instructions that a university web team can follow without guessing

Your work must preserve approved university information, identify missing proof points, and never introduce unsupported claims.

### 2. Advanced Schema Markup and Entity Architecture

You will design, write, validate, and maintain structured data for degree-program pages.

This includes:

* JSON-LD using clean, reusable ---------- architecture
* Entity relationships across university, school, department, program, credential, course, faculty, outcomes, costs, and actions
* Appropriate use of ---------- types such as:

* `CollegeOrUniversity`
* `EducationalOrganization`
* `EducationalOccupationalProgram`
* `Course`
* `Offer`
* `WebPage`
* `BreadcrumbList`
* `Article`
* `Person`
* `Organization`
* `FAQPage` only when appropriate and visibly supported on-page
* Consistent entity IDs and relationships across multiple program pages
* Schema updates whenever tuition, curriculum, application links, webinar links, start dates, or program details change
* Validation through Google Rich Results Test, ---------- Validator, source-code review, and rendered-page QA
* Clear deployment instructions for Drupal, WordPress, custom CMS environments, HTML templates, or tag-management systems

We do not want copied boilerplate schema. We need someone who understands why each entity, property, relationship, and field belongs on a page.

### 3. Technical SEO and Site Health

You will identify and translate technical problems into prioritized, solvable work.

This includes:

* Crawlability, indexability, canonicalization, redirects, sitemaps, robots directives, page hierarchy, duplicate content, and JavaScript-rendering issues
* Core Web Vitals, page-speed, mobile performance, and technical performance recommendations
* Google Search Console review and issue prioritization
* Recommendations for HTML structure, accessible semantic markup, structured content, and PDFs or other assets that interfere with discoverability
* Technical tickets that separate what MF Digital can execute, what the client web team must execute, and what requires outside development support

You do not need to personally control every university CMS. You must be able to diagnose the issue, write an implementation-ready solution, validate the work after deployment, and flag when a developer is required.

### 4. AI Search Readiness

You will help make university content easier for generative-search systems to understand, retrieve, and cite.

This includes:

* Structuring pages around clear entities, direct answers, sourceable facts, and machine-readable relationships
* Identifying content gaps that prevent a program from answering high-intent student questions
* Translating search intent into citation-ready page modules without making ranking or citation promises
* Supporting prompt-coverage and AI-search evidence when requested by the strategy team
* Keeping recommendations grounded in what is published, verifiable, and approved by the institution

### 5. Quality Assurance, Documentation, and Handoff

A major purpose of this role is to make MF Digital less dependent on any one outside specialist.

You will:

* Maintain organized source files, version history, schema libraries, page templates, validation records, and implementation notes
* Create reusable SOPs for program-page audits, structured data, deployment, and QA
* Document every material recommendation, source, decision, and change
* Review live implementations for broken JSON, duplicate schema, stale facts, invalid URLs, mismatched metadata, and missing content
* Make your work understandable enough that another qualified technical professional could continue it

## Required Experience

* At least 5 years of hands-on technical SEO experience
* Demonstrated expertise writing and implementing JSON-LD / ---------- markup
* Proven ability to create page-level on-page SEO recommendations, not just audit summaries
* Strong HTML and CSS skills; JavaScript experience strongly preferred
* Experience working in WordPress, Drupal, custom CMS environments, or website templates
* Experience with Google Search Console, GA4, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, PageSpeed Insights, and structured-data validators
* Strong understanding of crawl/indexing issues, technical SEO, canonicalization, rendering, redirects, sitemaps, and Core Web Vitals
* Ability to read source code, identify implementation problems, and give exact corrective instructions
* Excellent written English and unusually high attention to factual accuracy
* Experience working with large, multi-page, high-authority websites
* Comfortable working from detailed briefs, handling version control, and documenting technical decisions

## Preferred Experience

* Technical SEO work for higher education, professional services, healthcare, finance, law, or another regulated category
* Knowledge graphs, entity modeling, semantic SEO, or knowledge-panel optimization
* Python, JavaScript, SQL, or automation experience
* Experience creating reusable schema-generation workflows
* Experience with enterprise CMS or university web-governance environments
* Familiarity with how Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other generative-search systems retrieve and summarize web content

## What Success Looks Like in Your First 90 Days

* Validate and document our existing program-page schema work
* Review and improve our current on-page SEO and AI-search recommendation format
* Build a reusable structured-data architecture for graduate-program pages
* Create a technical SEO QA checklist for live deployments
* Establish clear documentation so technical work is no longer held only in one consultant’s head
* Produce implementation-ready work that our internal team and university web teams can use immediately

## How to Apply

Please include all of the following:

1. Your desired monthly full-time compensation.
2. Your available working hours and overlap with U.S. Central Time.
3. At least two live URLs where you personally created or implemented JSON-LD/schema markup.
4. For each example, explain:

* What schema types you used
* Why you used them
* Whether you deployed the code yourself
* How you validated the final implementation
5. One example of a page-level SEO recommendation document you created. Remove confidential client information if necessary.
6. A short answer to this question:
**How would you prevent schema from becoming inaccurate when tuition, curriculum, deadlines, or application links change?**
7. Begin your application with this exact word:
**CITABLE**

Qualified candidates will complete a paid technical test before final selection.