Principal Speech Data Linguist (AI)

Location: Remote - United States

Salary: $160,000–$185,000 per year, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Company

hirify.global is a global data engineering company providing data, evaluation frameworks, platforms, and human expertise for generative AI builders and adopters.

What you will do

• Define transcription and segmentation standards, style guides, annotation conventions, timestamping rules, speaker labels, diarization labels, and non-speech event conventions.
• Build quality frameworks covering rubrics, error taxonomies, adjudication, inter-annotator agreement, and human QA at scale.
• Own the end-to-end quality lifecycle for speech data, including preprocessing, acceptance checks, post-processing, validation, reporting, and delivery packaging.
• Design human-in-the-loop workflows that focus expert review on cases ASR models cannot reliably handle.
• Address accented, dialectal, multilingual, low-resource, overlapping, domain-specific, and noisy speech.
• Partner with research scientists, delivery operations, customers, and frontier labs to translate model objectives into speech-data specifications and best practices.

Requirements

• Typically 8+ years of industry experience in transcription, segmentation, and speech-data quality, including authorship of standards.
• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, phonetics, computational linguistics, or a closely related field; an advanced degree is preferred.
• Strong knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, IPA, prosody, disfluencies, dialects, and registers.
• Hands-on experience with acoustic and phonetic analysis, spectrograms, formants, pitch, prosody, segment boundaries, and tools such as Praat.
• Experience with Whisper, commercial ASR engines, forced alignment, ELAN, audio segmentation, diarization, Python, regular expressions, WER, and inter-annotator agreement.
• Multilingual experience with accented, dialectal, and code-switched speech, plus strong written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to have

• Low-resource language experience.
• Advanced degree in a relevant field.
• Knowledge of responsible-AI topics in speech, including accent and dialect bias, privacy, and consent in voice data.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work within the United States.
• Work on speech-data workflows supporting generative AI builders, adopters, and frontier labs.
• Collaboration with research scientists, delivery operations, customers, and expert reviewers.
• Opportunity to shape standards and methodologies as speech models and human-in-the-loop workflows evolve.