Infrastructure Engineering - Linguist III

Pyramid Consulting, Inc; Burlingame (CA); Hybrid; USD 69,000 - 77,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Paid sick leave

Job summary

Pyramid Consulting, Inc. has an immediate contract opening for Infrastructure Engineering - Linguist III in Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA.

This 06+ months hybrid role focuses on linguistic expertise and NLP QA for ASR projects, with strong emphasis on transcription and labeling quality. The selected candidate will design experiments, manage labeling workflows, and work closely with engineers on phonetics, IPA/SAMPA, and ToBI standards.

Qualifications

• BA/MA/PhD in linguistics with applied linguistics knowledge (phonetics/phonology).
• Proficiency in Python and SQL required.
• Experience with transcription/annotation systems (SAMPA/IPA/ToBI).
• Experience in computational linguistics/ASR quality evaluation (WER/CER/SER).
• Hands-on experience with annotator training and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Provide linguistic expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments to evaluate transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for concurrent projects ensuring high-quality label alignments and POS tagging.
• Create and perfect text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical/transcription metadata.
• Analyze system metrics to remedy pain points.

Skills

Python

SQL

Linguistics knowledge

Communication skills

ASR quality evaluation

Dataset creation

Waveform analysis

Education

BA/MA/PhD in linguistics

Tools

SAMPA

IPA

ToBI

Job description

Immediate need for a talented Infrastructure Engineering - Linguist III. This is a 06+months contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA(Hybrid). Please review the job description below and contact me ASAP if you are interested.

Job ID: 26-29498

Pay Range: $50/hr - $56/hour. Employee benefits include, but are not limited to, health insurance (medical, dental, vision), 401(k) plan, and paid sick leave (depending on work location).

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide linguistic expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments for evaluating transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for multiple concurrent projects, 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 to remedy pain points.

Key Requirements and Technology Experience:

• Foundational linguistics background — a BA/MA/PhD in linguistics, with applied linguistics knowledge (phonetics, phonology, familiarity with spoken vs. written forms).
• Technical skills — proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written.
• Knowledge of transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA, and ToBI.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Experience in computational linguistics / ASR with quality evaluation using WER/CER/SER, dataset creation, and quality assessment (both commissioned and synthetic).
• Hands-on experience with human grading operations, writing guidelines, and training annotators.
• Familiarity with both offline/synthetic data and live traffic quality evaluation for voice assistants.

Our client is a leading IT Industry, and we are currently interviewing to fill this and other similar contract positions.

Pyramid Consulting, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.