Job Title: Linguist II (LLM/AI)Location: Sunnyvale, CA; New York, NY; Burlingame, WA; or Redmond, WA (Onsite 3 days/week)Duration: Contract - 12 monthsPay Range: $36/hr - $40.20/hr (W2)Job ID: 406942About BCforwardBCforward is a leading global IT consulting and workforce solutions firm providing services and support to Fortune 500 and government clients. Founded in 1998, BCforward has grown with our customers needs into a full-service business solutions provider. With delivery centers and offices across North America and India, we take pride in building long-term relationships and delivering excellence through innovation, collaboration, and integrity.Job DescriptionWe are seeking a Linguist II to join our team and help develop language components for AI-powered products, including large language models (LLMs) and voice-enabled technologies. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in linguistic data analysis, language technology, and programming familiarity and a proven ability to support data collection, synthetic data generation, and annotation efforts for LLM/AI training, evaluation, alignment, and AI agent development.Responsibilities:Apply linguistic expertise in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics to support LLM and generative AI systems.Collaborate with linguists, data operations teams, and ML engineers on data collection, curation, annotation, and localization for training and fine-tuning.Develop and maintain annotation schemas and guidelines for LLM training data, including instruction-tuning, preference labeling, and RLHF.Evaluate and quality-check datasets used for pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment of language models.Support programmatic methods to generate synthetic annotated data at scale.Assist in model evaluation, including prompt-based testing, red-teaming, and linguistic error analysis.Participate in experiments to assess data quality, annotation consistency, and downstream model performance.Required Skills & Qualifications:Bachelor's degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Speech Science, or related field.1+ years of experience in Linguistics, Language Technologies, NLP, or AI/ML data operations, or equivalent.Knowledge of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics.Familiarity with LLMs, their applications, and data practices including training data, evaluation, prompting, and fine-tuning.Exposure to LLM evaluation methodologies such as human evaluation, automated metrics, and adversarial testing.Experience with semantic ontologies, taxonomies, or intent/slot frameworks.Proficiency using AI agents or chatbots.Experience with database queries and data analysis tools such as SQL, spreadsheets, R, or Unix.Experience working with speech and text data in multiple languages.Ability to operate in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with evolving priorities.Preferred Skills:Native or near-native fluency in English and at least one additional language.Master's degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Technologies, or related field.Familiarity with ML frameworks and NLP libraries and tools such as Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK, or PyTorch.Exposure to statistical language modeling or training data pipelines.Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.Why BCforward?At BCforward, we believe in advancing lives and careers. When you join our team, you gain access to:Competitive compensation and benefits.Opportunities for growth with global clients.A supportive, inclusive culture that values innovation and people.Exposure to cutting-edge technologies and projects.About Our CommitmentBCforward is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status.Fair Chance NoticePursuant to the California Fair Chance Act, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, qualified applicants will be considered for assignment with arrest and conviction records. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position, including adherence to company policies, use of sound judgment, effective stress management, safe and respectful collaboration, trustworthiness, meeting client expectations and standards, and safeguarding business operations and company reputation.Interested? Apply Now!If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, please apply with your most recent resume.