Ambassador Taylor joined the Foreign Service in 1969 and was posted as vice consul in Santo Domingo.

[2] He then served as staff assistant in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs from 1971–1972, becoming consul in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1973.

Moving to the embassy in Belgrade, he served there for three years as economic officer.

In 1977 he was stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia as energy attaché, moving to the embassy in Ottawa as economic officer from 1980–1984.

Ambassador Taylor graduated from Ohio University and received a master's degree from American University and another from Harvard in addition to spending a year at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. His foreign languages are Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian.