Linguist III / Speech & ASR Quality

PROLIM Global Corporation ( is hiring a Linguist III / Speech & ASR Quality for a leading Technology Customer.

Title: Linguist III / Speech & ASR Quality
Location: Onsite is Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA.
Duration: 6 months

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.

Skills:
• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology and other areas of linguistics.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent communication skills both verbal and written.
• Knowledge in transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA and ToBI.

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.

Minimum Years of Experience
5+

Related Job Titles/Keywords
Computational Linguist, Language Engineer, Linguist 3, Speech Data Analyst, ASR Quality Analyst, WER, TTS, MOS, annotation, transcription 

Degrees/Certifications 
Degree in Linguistics or Computational Linguistics preferred; not primarily data science or SWE 

Interested Candidates

Please send your updated resume and contact details to:

About PROLIM Corporation

PROLIM is a leading provider of end-to-end IT, PLM, and Engineering Services and Solutions for Global 1000 companies. We understand business as much as technology and help our customers improve profitability and efficiency through high-value consulting, staffing, engineering, and project management services.

Our offerings include Advisory Services, PLM Software & Services, Program Management, Solution Architecture, Training & Staffing, Cloud Solutions, Infrastructure Services, ERP Practices, Quality Assurance Services, and Engineering Services across a wide range of industries.