Strategic Project Lead, Speech AI & Data Ops (Flexible)

Appen 2; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Appen seeks a Strategic Project Lead - Speech Audio to join our Operations organization, driving frontier AI data programs. You will own complex projects from planning through delivery, applying project management, domain expertise, and quality ownership to help clients build speech recognition systems, voice agents, and other AI applications.

You will collaborate with clients and internal teams to refine workflows, establish quality standards, and mentor Operations Specialists while shaping

Qualifications

• 1–2+ years in AI data operations, project coordination, or delivery, ideally in GenAI/frontier AI.
• Hands-on familiarity with at least one speech/audio/language/conversational AI workflow.
• Experience coordinating projects, managing stakeholders, and communicating with clients.
• Understanding data quality, annotation workflows, and QA methods.
• Ability to translate client requirements into clear guidelines, workflows, and standards.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment.

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, 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

AI data operations

Project coordination

Delivery

Speech AI workflow

Stakeholder management

Client communication

Job description

Appen seeks a Strategic Project Lead - Speech Audio to join our Operations organization, driving frontier AI data programs. You will own complex projects from planning through delivery, applying project management, domain expertise, and quality ownership to help clients build speech recognition systems, voice agents, and other AI applications.

You will collaborate with clients and internal teams to refine workflows, establish quality standards, and mentor Operations Specialists while shaping