Strategic Speech & Audio Programs Lead

Appen; United States; On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Appen is seeking a Strategic Project Lead – Speech & Audio to drive frontier AI data programs in our Operations team in the United States. You will own complex projects from planning through delivery, collaborating with clients and cross-functional teams to ensure top-quality speech and audio data for AI applications.

You will translate client requirements into actionable workflows, monitor quality metrics such as transcription accuracy and WER, and build scalable guidelines and QA frameworks

Qualifications

• 1–2+ years in AI data operations, project coordination, or delivery.
• 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 QA methods.
• Ability to turn client requirements into clear guidelines, workflows, and quality standards.
• Strong problem-solving skills in fast-moving environments.
• Interest in current AI developments in speech, audio, and voice AI.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery across scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, and risks.
• Manage client communication, status updates, workshops, and escalations.
• Translate client requirements into guidelines, workflows, tooling, and quality standards.
• Define and monitor quality metrics (transcription accuracy, WER, diarization, linguistic consistency).
• Troubleshoot quality issues and resolve ambiguous requirements with clients.
• Provide domain expertise across speech and audio workflows, advising on feasibility and evaluation methods.
• 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

Speech/Audio AI

Client communication

Quality assurance

Domain expertise

Mentoring

Job description

Appen is seeking a Strategic Project Lead – Speech & Audio to drive frontier AI data programs in our Operations team in the United States. You will own complex projects from planning through delivery, collaborating with clients and cross-functional teams to ensure top-quality speech and audio data for AI applications.

You will translate client requirements into actionable workflows, monitor quality metrics such as transcription accuracy and WER, and build scalable guidelines and QA frameworks