Senior Linguist (Speech)

BharatGen; Mumbai; On-site; INR 1,000,000 - 1,400,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading speech technology firm seeks a Speech Linguist Lead in Mumbai, India. You will oversee pretraining data quality validation and model output evaluation, designing frameworks for large-scale ASR/TTS datasets. The ideal candidate holds a Master's or PhD in Linguistics and has 3+ years of experience in speech technology. You'll collaborate with ML engineers and data teams to enhance model performance and ensure linguistic quality across multiple Indian languages. This role is critical for advancing the firm's speech technologies.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in speech technology projects (ASR/TTS).
• Experience designing or supervising speech annotation workflows.
• Familiarity with speech corpus design — phoneme balancing, prosody control.

Responsibilities

• Define and operationalize quality standards for speech datasets.
• Design evaluation frameworks for speech models concerning various metrics.
• Collaborate to structure validation and evaluation workflows.

Skills

Speech technology

Model evaluation

Linguistic theory

Data quality validation

Collaboration with ML teams

Education

Master’s or PhD in Linguistics/Computational Linguistics

Job description

The Speech Linguist Lead will own both pretraining data quality validation and model output evaluation for BharatGen’s speech technology efforts. You will design validation frameworks for large-scale ASR/TTS datasets, define linguistic and acoustic quality standards, and evaluate model outputs for intelligibility, fluency, and naturalness. This role requires a linguist or speech technologist who can bridge linguistic theory, acoustic data understanding, and operational execution — collaborating closely with ML engineers, data collection teams, and freelance linguists.

Key Responsibilities

• Speech Data Quality & Pretraining Validation:
• Define and operationalize quality standards for large-scale speech datasets across multiple Indian languages.
• Establish quality review loops for vendor- or freelancer-generated ASR and TTS data.
• Recommend data cleaning, filtering, or balancing strategies to ML teams for improving pretraining corpora.
• Model Evaluations:
• Design and operationalize evaluation frameworks for speech models — covering recognition and generation.
• Define metrics and rubrics for intelligibility, fluency, pronunciation accuracy, prosody, naturalness, and contextual appropriateness.
• Develop and maintain human evaluation pipelines, including listening tests, MOS (Mean Opinion Score) surveys, and structured rating rubrics.
• Implement inter-annotator agreement tracking, quality audits.
• Process Design & Collaboration:
• Collaborate with the Data Operations Manager to structure validation and evaluation workflows across multiple languages.
• Train and mentor linguists and annotators on speech data quality and evaluation standards.
• Master’s or PhD in Linguistics/Computational Linguistics with a focus on speech with 3+ years of experience in speech technology projects (ASR/TTS)
• Experience in designing or supervising speech annotation or evaluation workflows.
• Experience collaborating with ML teams to interpret or improve model performance.
• Experience in designing or evaluating ASR or TTS systems in Indian languages.
• Familiarity with speech corpus design — phoneme balancing, prosody control, or expressive speech.
• Prior work with human evaluation frameworks (listening tests, MOS, A/B testing).