Linguist III (NLP)

Location: Hybrid in Redmond, Washington, or Burlingame, California

Salary: $55–$60 per hour

Company

Provides information technology and workforce solutions through a large professional services organization operating across the United States and Canada.

What you will do

• Determine speech-data needs and define data-driven improvements for language models and related products.
• Provide expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and natural language processing.
• Design and conduct experiments to evaluate transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated workflows for label alignment, prosodic classification, part-of-speech identification, targeted modeling data, and user feedback.
• Create and refine text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Analyze user opinion, lexicon coverage, POS tagger performance, and other system metrics, then address identified issues.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or a related field; an advanced linguistics degree is also relevant.
• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and spoken versus written language.
• Technical skills in Python and SQL.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Experience with transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA, and ToBI.
• Strong technical writing and communication skills for producing guidelines, documentation, and analysis reports.

Nice to have

• Experience with computational linguistics or automatic speech recognition, including WER, CER, SER, dataset creation, and quality assessment.
• Experience managing human grading operations, writing guidelines, and training annotators.
• Experience evaluating offline, synthetic, and live-traffic data for voice assistants.

Culture & Benefits

• Contract duration of 6+ months with possible extension.
• Full-time consultants may receive medical, dental, and vision benefits.
• Benefits may include 401(k) contributions, paid time off, sick leave, and other applicable statutory benefits.
• Artificial intelligence tools may be used during application evaluation, while final decisions are made by hiring personnel.