Linguist

Location: Burlingame, CA (Preferred) | New York, NY | Redmond, WA - Hybrid

Duration: 6-Month Contract (Potential for Extension)

Responsibilities: Evaluate and analyze speech recognition, language understanding, and conversational AI outputs. Create, review, and maintain linguistic annotations, transcriptions, and metadata. Develop and execute quality evaluation frameworks for speech and language datasets. Design annotation guidelines, evaluation rubrics, and documentation to ensure consistency and quality. Build, curate, and assess training and evaluation datasets. Perform linguistic analysis across phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. Use Python, SQL, and analytical tools to investigate data quality issues and identify improvement opportunities. Conduct error analysis and provide actionable recommendations for product and model enhancements. Collaborate with cross-functional teams including linguists, data scientists, engineers, and program managers. Support human evaluation programs, annotator training, and quality assurance processes.

Minimum Qualifications: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Speech Science, Language Technologies, or a related field. 5+ years of experience working with linguistic data, speech technologies, NLP, or language-focused AI systems. Strong understanding of: Phonetics, Phonology, Sociolinguistics, Dialectology, Corpus Linguistics, Syntax and Semantics Experience creating and maintaining annotation guidelines and linguistic evaluation frameworks. Proficiency in Python and SQL. Strong written communication and technical documentation skills. Experience working with multilingual speech and text data.

Preferred Qualifications: Experience supporting Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. Experience evaluating conversational AI, virtual assistants, or language technologies. Knowledge of transcription and annotation standards such as IPA, SAMPA, or ToBI. Experience with NLP tools and frameworks such as spaCy, NLTK, Hugging Face, or similar solutions. Experience conducting error analysis, quality assessments, and model evaluations. Familiarity with speech quality metrics and language data evaluation methodologies. xmvmafu Experience training annotators or managing human evaluation workflows.

Desired Skills: Linguistic Annotation, Computational Linguistics, Speech Technologies, ASR Evaluation, TTS Evaluation, NLP, Python, SQL, Data Analysis and Quality Evaluation