Strategic Lead, Speech & Audio AI Projects

Jobicy; United States; Remote; USD 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Appen is seeking a Strategic Project Lead - Speech & Audio to drive complex data programs for frontier AI. You will own projects end-to-end, coordinate with clients and internal teams, and shape workflows for speech, audio, and language data.

You will define quality metrics, advise on feasibility and tooling, and mentor Operations Specialists in a fast-evolving AI landscape. This role offers flexible work options and exposure to frontier technologies.

Qualifications

• 1–2+ years of experience in AI data operations, project coordination, or delivery, ideally in a GenAI or frontier AI environment.
• Hands-on familiarity with at least one speech, audio, language, or conversational AI workflow.
• Experience coordinating projects or workstreams, managing stakeholders, and communicating with clients.
• Understanding of data quality, annotation workflows, and quality assurance methods.
• Ability to turn client requirements into clear guidelines, workflows, and quality standards.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment.
• Interest in current AI developments and how speech, audio, and voice-agent technologies are evolving.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery across project scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, and risks.
• Manage client communication, status updates, workshops, and escalations.
• Translate client requirements into annotation guidelines, workflows, tooling, and quality standards.
• Define and monitor quality metrics, including transcription accuracy, word error rate (WER), diarization, and linguistic consistency.
• Troubleshoot quality issues and resolve ambiguous requirements with clients.
• Provide domain expertise across speech and audio workflows, advising on feasibility, evaluation methods, and tooling.
• Build reusable guidelines, SOPs, and QA frameworks while mentoring Operations Specialists.
• Support new project scoping, pilots, and capability development as speech and voice AI evolves.

Skills

Project coordination

Client communication

Quality assurance

Data operations

AI workflows

Tools

ASR transcription

Speaker diarization

Acoustic annotation

TTS evaluation

Job description

Appen is seeking a Strategic Project Lead - Speech & Audio to drive complex data programs for frontier AI. You will own projects end-to-end, coordinate with clients and internal teams, and shape workflows for speech, audio, and language data.

You will define quality metrics, advise on feasibility and tooling, and mentor Operations Specialists in a fast-evolving AI landscape. This role offers flexible work options and exposure to frontier technologies.