Language Engineer TPM

About the Role

Ascendion is seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead multilingual speech-data annotation and quality-assurance programs delivered to a major cloud/AI client. You will own end-to-end data annotation, transcription, and evaluation workflows that produce training and evaluation data for speech-to-text models across high- and low-resource languages.

Key Responsibilities

• Own multiple concurrent multilingual data programs end-to-end, from scoping and methodology through annotation, evaluation, and delivery.
• Manage scope, timelines, and deliverables across active workstreams, keeping research requirements, operational realities, and client expectations aligned.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for the client, translating research and product requirements into delivery plans and reporting on progress, quality, and risk.
• Design annotation workflows, quality metrics, and gating logic for cross-vendor data evaluation.
• Create localization and transcription guidelines that adapt English transcription standards to each target language, and coordinate cross-vendor review of those guidelines.
• Recruit, evaluate (via standardized diagnostics and candidate questionnaires), and manage teams of linguist annotators across a wide range of languages and locales.
• Construct rate cards, model effort multipliers and program costs, track program financials, and manage billing methodology and disputes with the client.
• Use and manage web-based annotation tooling, ensuring data output matches requirements. Interpret, QA, and direct programmatic speech analyses (for example, SNR analysis, voice activity detection, and acoustic artifact detection).

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications: MA in linguistics or computational linguistics (PhD strongly preferred). Demonstrated experience with large-scale language data collection, in either an academic or industry setting. Experience recruiting and managing teams of annotators, including native-speaker annotators across multiple languages. Proven program or project management across concurrent workstreams, multiple stakeholders, and external partners. Technical fluency sufficient to specify, interpret, and QA quantitative speech and data analyses; comfortable using Python for language data processing. Ability to translate between research requirements and operational execution. Strong technical writing and documentation skills.
• Desired Qualifications: PhD in linguistics or computational linguistics. Hands-on Python (pandas, numpy) for data or acoustic analysis. Familiarity with speech/ASR concepts: signal-to-noise ratio, voice activity detection, sample rates, telephony audio, and acoustic quality evaluation. Experience scoping low-resource languages and dialectal variation for data collection. Familiarity with cloud data tooling and annotation platforms (for example, S3, SageMaker Ground Truth, or comparable). Experience computing inter-annotator agreement and designing stratified sampling methodologies. Additional language competencies.

Location and Compensation

Location: Remote
Salary Range: The salary for this position is between $80,000 - $90,000 annually. Factors which may affect pay within this range may include geography/market, skills, education, experience, and other qualifications of the successful candidate.

Benefits

• The Company offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:
• [medical insurance]
• [dental insurance]
• [vision insurance]
• [401(k) retirement plan]
• [life insurance]
• [long-term disability insurance]
• [short-term disability insurance]
• The Paid time off benefits meet the paid sick and safe time laws that pertains to the City/ State
• [10-15 days of paid vacation time]
• [6 paid holidays and 1 floating holiday per calendar year]
• [Ascendion Learning Management System]