Forward Deployed Linguist

Rime builds the most natural-sounding text-to-speech for voice AI. Our customers deploy Rime voices in high-stakes, high-volume conversational applications - contact centers, outbound calling, healthcare, financial services, and more. Linguistics is at the core of everything we build. As we scale enterprise sales, we're hiring our first Forward Deployed Linguist to sit at the intersection of linguistics expertise, customer success, and go-to-market.

This is a customer-facing, technical role. You'll be the linguistic counterpart to our Forward Deployed Engineer, embedded with customers from pilot through production and report into the Revenue department. You'll also work directly with R&D to translate research into customer-facing guidance and sales assets: closing the loop between how we build and how we sell.

What you'll do

• Guide enterprise customers through voice selection: matching use case, brand, and user base to the right speaker from our catalog.
• Enable customers sales teams to effectively leverage Rime products.
• Own prompting and text normalization guidance. You'll advise on how to write clean input text so voices render correctly, and build reusable documentation customers can act on independently.
• Define success with customers. Working from their KPIs: call completion, mid-call hangup rates, CSAT. You'll help establish evaluation criteria and interpret quality feedback in a way that maps to actionable changes.
• Support voice actor booking and selection for custom voice and cloning projects, including script design and recording quality requirements.
• Be present in customer Slack channels during pilots and after contract, triaging pronunciation and prosody issues in real time.
• Develop sales and marketing assets: voice evaluation guides, text norm documentation, use case briefs, demo scripts, all grounded in genuine linguistic expertise.
• Partner with R&D to stay ahead of model capabilities, surface patterns from customer deployments, and translate technical advances into language customers understand.

What we're looking for

• Strong background in linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, prosody, or related areas. A PhD is a plus; deep practical knowledge matters most.
• Genuine curiosity about speech perception and how people evaluate voice quality. Experience with perceptual experiments or listening evaluations is a plus.
• Multilingual proficiency, particularly in languages we serve or are expanding into. Native or near-native fluency in at least one language beyond English is a plus.
• Comfort in customer-facing roles. You can explain phonemic inventory to a researcher or explain why "HelloMD" is being mispronounced to a product manager: clearly, without condescension.
• Strong writing skills. You'll produce customer-facing documentation, sales collateral, and internal guidance that needs to be precise and accessible.
• Ability to be responsive in async Slack-based customer environments during business hours.
• Familiarity with how LLM prompting intersects with TTS pipelines: or a strong appetite to learn quickly.
• Experience working with speech synthesis, voice UI, or voice AI products is a strong plus.
• Preferred Bay Area, but flexible

Why Join Rime

• Direct collaboration with founders
• Real impact on company trajectory
• Meaningful equity upside, competitive salary and variable compensation
• High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy

At Rime, we...

• Are outliers
• Cut through the hype to focus on the craft
• Move fast with agency and freedom
• Maintain a growth mindset, finding joy in the struggle
• Do the right things, knowing that it'll lead to making money

If that sounds like you too, you'll be a great fit for Rime!