SPORTS CARD LEAD (DATABASE & RESEARCH)

Ace Grading – Banbury/Bicester, Oxfordshire (On‑site)
Salary: £30,000–£35,000 per year (DOE)
Job type: Full‑time, Permanent
Schedule: Monday–Friday, on‑site
Also known as: Sports Card Researcher / Sports Card Database Lead

THE ROLE

You will be the in‑house authority for sports cards at Ace. Your mission is to build, maintain, and continuously improve our sports card database and ingestion workflows so that graders receive accurate, complete records every time.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own and maintain Ace’s sports card database across Football (Soccer), Basketball, American Football, Baseball, Hockey, F1, UFC/WWE and more.
• Research and input full checklists for new and legacy releases (sets, subsets, inserts, parallels, variations, serial‑numbering, RC designations, autos, patches, SP/SSP, FOTL, Sapphire, etc.).
• Create and enforce clear naming conventions and taxonomies (set/brand, year, team, player, card number, parallel colour/pattern, print run).
• Ingest incoming submissions: map customer cards to the correct record, resolve ambiguities, and flag edge cases for graders.
• Track new release calendars and update the database quickly as products drop.
• Perform data hygiene: dedupe, merge, and correct records; manage synonyms and historical player/team changes.