Japanese QA Lead - Remote

About the role

In this hourly, remote contractor role, you will work as a Japanese Quality Assurance Lead to oversee quality, consistency, and trainer performance across Japanese AI training projects. You will review AI-generated Japanese content and trainer/QA work, evaluate output quality against project guidelines, provide precise written feedback, and ensure that all contributors follow the expected quality standards.

Responsibilities

• Spot-check Japanese items, identify quality issues, provide feedback through DMs, and escalate recurring or critical issues.
• Update trainers and QAs on Discord about guidelines, project changes, workflow updates, and quality expectations.
• Respond to questions around Japanese grammar, keigo, register, kana/kanji usage, translation fidelity, cultural context, terminology, and edge cases.
• DM inactive contributors, encourage activation, track follow-ups, and flag availability issues.
• Create and maintain Japanese documentation, style guides, trackers, FAQs, quality notes, examples, honeypots, and onboarding materials.
• Run onboarding/training calls to explain workflows, rubrics, quality standards, and Japanese-specific requirements.
• Ensure all trainers and QAs apply Japanese language guidelines consistently.
• Identify recurring quality gaps and build scalable QA processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Japanese, Linguistics, Translation, Communications, Journalism, English, Education, Quality Assurance, or a relevant domain/related field.
• Native or near-native Japanese proficiency, with strong reading and writing skills.
• A strong grasp of the English language to follow project guidelines, communicate with teams, and provide clear feedback in English.
• 3+ years of professional experience in Japanese writing, editing, translation, localization, content QA, AI training, education, annotation, or related language-review workflows.
• A strong understanding of Japanese grammar, kana/kanji usage, punctuation, keigo, tone, register, honorifics, cultural context, and Japan-specific localization.
• The ability to evaluate Japanese content against detailed rubrics and identify issues such as mistranslation, literal phrasing, unnatural tone, incorrect keigo, ambiguous references, hallucinated claims, or inconsistent terminology.
• Experience leading or supporting remote teams of trainers, annotators, reviewers, editors, or QAs is strongly preferred.
• Comfortable with Discord, Google Sheets, Google Docs, trackers, dashboards, and project management systems.
• A highly detail-oriented and organized individual with the ability to maintain style guides, FAQs, trackers, onboarding materials, honeypots, and documentation.
• Experience with AI training, data annotation, LLM evaluation, prompt/response evaluation, or rubric-based LLM QA is a strong plus.