[Hiring] Principal Speech Data Linguist @Innodata Inc.

Role Description

As speech and audio models get better, the human role gets harder, not easier — it moves from producing transcripts to defining what a correct one is, adjudicating the cases models still get wrong, and designing the human-in-the-loop workflows that keep improving them. Innodata runs high-volume segmentation and transcription workflows for the customers and frontier labs building these models, and we are hiring a principal-level linguist to own the linguistic standards and quality behind that work — today, and as the workflows evolve alongside the models over the next two years.

This is the applied-expert counterpart to our Speech & Audio Research Scientist. You set the standards the models are trained and measured against, and you understand the big picture: how different transcription and segmentation methods change what a model learns, and how that ripples into the speech and content-understanding systems our partners are building. You know the research and you know the tools — from IPA and acoustic analysis to forced alignment and the ASR engines our partners benchmark against — but your leverage is linguistic judgment and standard-setting at scale, not building models yourself.

What You’ll Own

• Own the linguistic foundation of Innodata's segmentation and transcription work across languages, domains, and use cases.
• Define transcription and segmentation standards, style guides, and annotation conventions — verbatim and clean/intelligent verbatim, IPA and phonetic transcription, timestamping and boundary segmentation, speaker labeling and diarization labels, disfluencies and non-speech events, code-switching, and orthographic conventions.
• Establish and run the quality frameworks behind that work: rubrics, error taxonomies, adjudication processes, inter-annotator agreement, and human QA at scale.
• Own the quality lifecycle for transcription and segmentation deliverables end to end — pre-processing and normalization of incoming data, quality checks at the point of acceptance, post-processing and pre-delivery validation against spec, and report creation and packaging for delivery — partnering with delivery operations on execution at scale.
• Design the human-in-the-loop workflows themselves — deciding where human review, correction, and adjudication add the most value as ASR quality rises.
• Handle the linguistically hard cases models fail on — accented and dialectal speech, low-resource and multilingual audio, overlapping speech, domain jargon (medical, legal, technical), and noisy acoustic conditions.
• Partner with the Speech & Audio Research Scientist to turn model objectives into transcription and segmentation specifications.
• Train, calibrate, and mentor expert transcribers and reviewers, and build the onboarding and calibration that keep quality consistent as the work scales.
• Represent Innodata's transcription and segmentation approach to the customers and frontier labs we partner with.

Qualifications

• Substantial industry experience (typically 8+ years) in transcription, segmentation, and speech-data quality.
• A Bachelor's degree in linguistics, phonetics, or computational linguistics, or a closely related field, is required.
• A big-picture grasp of how transcription and segmentation choices flow downstream into modeling.
• Fluency in phonetic transcription and IPA, plus hands-on experience with acoustic and phonetic analysis of speech.
• Deep experience with audio segmentation and its conventions.
• Hands-on fluency with the modern speech stack: Whisper and commercial ASR engines.
• Comfort scripting for speech-data work — Python for batch processing, QA, and metrics.
• Practical data-management skills across the delivery lifecycle.
• Multilingual capability and hands-on experience with accented, dialectal, and code-switched speech.
• A point of view on how human-in-the-loop workflows should evolve as models improve.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Requirements

• Bonus: responsible-AI considerations for speech, such as bias across accents and dialects and privacy and consent in voice data.

Benefits

• The expected salary range for this position is $160,000 - $185,000 p/year, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.