Linguist II

TTS Linguist II (tr_TR)
Location: Fully Remote - US Only
Duration: 6-month contract with probable extension/conversion
Pay Rate: $53/hr on W2
Target Start: June 4, 2026
Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision and Weekly Pay

Our client is seeking a skilled Linguist II to join their Text-to-Speech (TTS) team. This role focuses on improving speech generation systems to sound natural, expressive, and robust. You will leverage your expertise as a native Turkish speaker to enhance multilingual TTS models, text normalization, and NLP pipelines. The position offers a unique opportunity to shape user-facing voice experiences and contribute to cutting-edge language technologies.

About the Team
The TTS team’s mission is to build and improve TTS models (speech generation) to sound more natural, expressive, and robust, including things like prosody and non-verbal cues (e.g., laughter/breath). The team also supports multilingual + i18n efforts: expanding language coverage and handling tricky cases like code-switching, accents, and language ID. They deploy/integrate models into products (sometimes including on-device inference constraints for wearables), and develop pipelines/guidelines to measure naturalness and expressivity. Native speaker expertise is essential for new TTS locales.

Job Responsibilities:

• Provide linguistic expertise in the areas of phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments for evaluating transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for multiple concurrent projects including ensuring high-quality label alignments, prosodic classification, POS identification and disambiguation, targeted modeling data, and user feedback.
• Create and perfect text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions and related data.
• Analyze system metrics such as user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance and remedy pain points.

Must-Have Qualifications:

• Native-level fluency in tr_TR
• Familiarity with command-line, scripting, and versioning systems
• Phonetics/phonology, including experience with transcription in IPA or SAMPA -OR- experience with regexes
• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology and other areas of linguistics.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent communication skills both verbal and written.
• Knowledge in transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA and ToBI.
• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or related field.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Python
• Data analysis

Pursuant to the California Fair Chance Act, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, qualified applicants will be considered for assignment with arrest and conviction records. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness, meet client expectations, standards, and accompanying requirements, and safeguard business operations and company reputation.