Linguist III # 26-24115

About the Role

The main function of a Linguist is to determine speech data needs and setting strategic vision for data based model and product improvements. This position adds dedicated ASR/TTS evaluation capacity, reporting to the hiring manager with day-to-day direction from the linguistics lead. Duration: 6 Months.

Responsibilities

• Provide linguistic expertise in the areas of phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments for evaluating 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 perfect 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 remedy pain points.

Skills

Must-Have Skills:

• Foundational linguistics background — a BA/MA/PhD in linguistics, with applied linguistics knowledge (phonetics, phonology, familiarity with spoken vs. written forms). A linguistics background is required; a purely data science or engineering background is not a substitute.
• Technical skills — SQL and Python.
• Technical writing — able to produce clear guidelines, documentation, and analysis write-ups.
• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology and other areas of linguistics.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent communication skills both verbal and written.
• Knowledge in transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA and ToBI.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Computational linguistics / ASR experience — quality evaluation using WER/CER/SER, dataset creation and quality assessment (both commissioned and synthetic), ideally some understanding of contextual biasing.
• Human grading operations — hands-on grading of data, writing guidelines, and training annotators.
• Experience with both offline/synthetic data and live traffic quality evaluation for voice assistants.

Requirements

Education / Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or related field. Degree in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics preferred; not primarily data science or SWE.
• Minimum 5+ years of experience.

Interview Process

2 Rounds [1 Soft Skills + 1 Technical (SQL/Python)]