Linguist III

Position: Linguist III
Location: Redmond, Washington/ Burlingame CA (Hybrid)
Duration: 6+ Months contract with Possible extension
Job ID: 179967

Job Overview:
The main function of a Linguist III is to determine speech data needs and set a strategic vision for data-based model and product improvements. This role requires expertise in linguistics, phonetics, and computational linguistics, as well as technical skills to support the development and evaluation of language models and related technologies.

Responsibilities:

• Provide linguistic expertise in areas such as phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and natural language processing (NLP).
• Design and conduct experiments to evaluate transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for multiple concurrent projects, including ensuring high-quality label alignments, prosodic classification, POS identification and disambiguation, targeted modeling data, and user feedback.
• Create and refine text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions and related metadata.
• Analyze system metrics such as user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance, and address identified issues.

Qualifications:

• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and other areas of linguistics.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Familiarity with prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Experience with transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA, and ToBI.

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or a related field.

Must-Have Skills:

• Foundational linguistics background (BA/MA/PhD in linguistics) with applied linguistics knowledge, including phonetics, phonology, and familiarity with spoken vs. written forms.
• Technical skills in SQL and Python.
• Strong technical writing skills to produce clear guidelines, documentation, and analysis write-ups.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Experience in computational linguistics or automatic speech recognition (ASR), including quality evaluation using WER/CER/SER, dataset creation, and quality assessment (both commissioned and synthetic).
• Hands-on experience with human grading operations, including grading data, writing guidelines, and training annotators.
• Experience with both offline/synthetic data and live traffic quality evaluation for voice assistants.

Candidate Profiles That May Not Be a Fit:

• Pure data science or engineering backgrounds without linguistics expertise.
• Professional translation or localization backgrounds without relevant linguistic or technical skills.

About PTR Global: PTR Global is a leading provider of information technology and workforce solutions. PTR Global has become one of the largest providers in its industry, with over 5000 professionals providing services across the U.S. and Canada. For more information visit

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Pay Range: $55- $60

The specific compensation for this position will be determined by several factors, including the scope, complexity, and location of the role, as well as the cost of labor in the market; the skills, education, training, credentials, and experience of the candidate; and other conditions of employment. Our full-time consultants have access to benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and 401K contributions, as well as PTO, sick leave, and other benefits mandated by applicable state or localities where you reside or work.

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