Senior Linguist - NLP & Phonology Specialist

BCforward; Burlingame (CA); Hybrid; USD 52,000 - 72,000; Full time

Job summary

BCforward is seeking a Linguist III to join our team in a contract role. The ideal candidate will apply expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, NLP, and linguistic data operations to design transcription experiments, develop scalable labeling processes, and drive data-informed product improvements.

This onsite-hybrid position is based in Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA, for six months with potential extension, paying $45 per hour.

Qualifications

• Foundational linguistics background with applied linguistics knowledge in phonetics and phonology, including familiarity with spoken versus written forms.
• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or a related field.
• Technical skills in SQL and Python.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Knowledge of transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA, and ToBI.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Provide linguistic expertise across phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments to evaluate transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for high-quality label alignments, prosodic classification, POS identification and disambiguation, targeted modeling datasets, and user feedback integration.
• Create and refine text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions and related data.
• Analyze system metrics, including user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance, and address identified gaps.

Skills

Linguistics

Phonetics

NLP

SQL

Python

Waveforms

Spectrograms

Prescriptive writing

SAMPA

IPA

ToBI

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in linguistics

Tools

SAMPA

IPA

ToBI

Job description

BCforward is seeking a Linguist III to join our team in a contract role. The ideal candidate will apply expertise in phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, NLP, and linguistic data operations to design transcription experiments, develop scalable labeling processes, and drive data-informed product improvements.

This onsite-hybrid position is based in Redmond, WA or Burlingame, CA, for six months with potential extension, paying $45 per hour.