Linguist III (ASR/TTS)

Location: Redmond, WA, United States

Company

hirify.global is a global staff augmentation firm providing on-demand talent and total workforce solutions.

What you will do

• Determine speech data needs and contribute to strategic data-driven model and product improvements.
• Provide linguistic expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments to evaluate transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated workflows for label alignment, prosodic classification, POS identification and disambiguation, modeling data, and user feedback.
• Create and refine text normalization and inverse text normalization processes, and manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions with related metadata.
• Analyze user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance metrics and address quality issues.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience.
• Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral background in linguistics is required, with applied linguistics knowledge including phonetics, phonology, and spoken versus written forms; a purely data science or engineering background is not a substitute.
• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and related areas of linguistics.
• Technical skills in SQL and Python.
• Ability to produce clear technical guidelines, documentation, and analysis write-ups.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Knowledge of transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA, and ToBI.
• A degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or a related field is required; a degree in linguistics or computational linguistics is preferred over a primarily data science or software engineering background.

Nice to have

• Computational linguistics or ASR experience, including WER, CER, and SER quality evaluation, dataset creation and quality assessment for commissioned and synthetic data, and contextual biasing.
• Hands-on human grading operations, including data grading, guideline writing, and annotator training.
• Experience evaluating offline or synthetic data and live-traffic quality for voice assistants.

Culture & Benefits

• Six-month engagement.
• Dedicated ASR/TTS evaluation capacity with reporting to the hiring manager and day-to-day direction from the linguistics lead.
• Equal opportunity employment practices.

Hiring process

• Two interview rounds: one soft-skills interview and one technical interview covering SQL and Python.
• AI-assisted tools may be used during hiring.