Linguist (Redmond)

Job Title: Linguist III / Computational Linguist

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

Duration: 6-Month Contract (Potential for Extension)

We are seeking a highly skilled Linguist/Computational Linguist to support the evaluation and improvement of advanced voice and language technologies. This role combines linguistic expertise, data analysis, annotation, and quality evaluation to enhance speech recognition, language understanding, and conversational AI experiences.

The ideal candidate has a strong foundation in linguistics, experience working with speech and language data, and the ability to leverage technical tools such as Python and SQL to analyze and improve data quality and model performance.

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.

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