Job Description

Linguist II (Contract)

Location: Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA (100% Onsite, 5 Days/Week) Duration: 12-Month Contract (Potential for Extension) Pay Rate: $55/hour on W2 Benefits: Health, Dental, Vision, PTO, and 401(k)

About the Role

We are seeking for an experienced Linguist II to join a multidisciplinary team focused on advancing speech and language technologies. In this role, you will leverage your expertise in phonetics, phonology, and computational linguistics to improve the quality of speech recognition, transcription, and language models powering next-generation AI experiences.

You will collaborate closely with engineers, data scientists, and researchers to develop linguistic resources, evaluate language data, design experiments, and improve machine learning models through high-quality linguistic analysis.

Responsibilities

• Apply advanced linguistic expertise across phonetics, phonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics to support AI model development.
• Design and execute experiments to evaluate speech transcription quality and improve language model performance.
• Develop scalable manual and automated workflows for speech annotation, transcription validation, and linguistic data processing.
• Create and maintain text normalization and inverse text normalization pipelines.
• Analyze speech datasets, user feedback, transcription quality metrics, and model outputs to identify improvement opportunities.
• Manage lexical resources, pronunciation dictionaries, transcription metadata, and linguistic annotations.
• Partner cross-functionally with engineers and researchers to develop high-quality multilingual datasets.
• Utilize Python and SQL to query, analyze, and manipulate linguistic datasets.
• Support AI and Large Language Model (LLM) initiatives by preparing and evaluating language data for model training and validation.

Must Have Qualifications

• Master's degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Speech Science, Language Technologies, or a related field. Bachelor's degree with 3+ years of professional experience in phonetics, phonology, or related linguistic disciplines will also be considered.
• Strong expertise in: phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, speech transcription.
• Experience with transcription and annotation systems such as IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), SAMPA, ToBI.
• Native or near-native fluency in English plus at least one additional language.
• Strong understanding of grammar, orthography, punctuation, and prescriptive writing conventions.
• Experience working with speech or language datasets.
• Proficiency in Python for data processing and automation.
• Proficiency writing SQL queries for data extraction and analysis.
• Experience working with AI, NLP, speech technologies, or Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to Have Qualifications

• Experience supporting speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) systems.
• Experience developing data pipelines for NLP or speech AI.
• Familiarity with machine learning workflows and model evaluation.
• Experience analyzing waveforms and spectrograms.
• Experience designing linguistic evaluation frameworks or quality metrics.
• Knowledge of multilingual language resources and localization.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional AI research teams.
• Fluency in one or more of the following languages: Thai, Tagalog, German, Italian, French.

The ideal candidate combines deep linguistic expertise with technical proficiency in data analysis and programming. They are passionate about speech technologies, enjoy solving complex language problems, and can bridge the gap between linguistic theory and practical AI applications. Success in this role requires strong analytical thinking, attention to detail, and the ability to work collaboratively across engineering, research, and data science teams.

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. #TMMT

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