Linguist III

Title: Linguist III
Location: Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA (Hybrid)
Duration: 6 months (potential extension)
Pay: $60-64/hr on W2

Summary:
The main function of a Linguist is to determine speech data needs and setting strategic vision for data based model and product improvements.

Job 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.

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or related field.

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.

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.

Pursuant 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. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness, meet client expectations, standards, and accompanying requirements, and safeguard business operations and company reputation.
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