Language Lead – Japanese

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Act as the main language expert and reliable point of contact for Japanese voice AI projects.

• Collaborate with the Human Evals Manager regarding project deliverables and timelines.

• Provide guidance to annotators on guidelines, edge cases, and language-specific topics.

• Disseminate feedback, instructions, and rubric updates to annotators.

• Review annotator-rated audio and evaluate its conformity with established rubrics.

• Create written quality assessments that include examples and recommendations.

• Assess TTS pronunciation, prosody, and naturalness in Japanese.

• Revise and expand annotation guidelines to address gaps and edge cases.

• Conduct calibration meetings and office hours for annotators.

• Develop onboarding materials for new annotators.

• Generate QA reports detailing annotation quality and calibration results.

• Review production audio and report any quality concerns.

• Investigate language-specific issues reported by customers and determine their root causes.

• Audit datasets to ensure linguistic accuracy, completeness, and consistency.

⛳️ Requirements

• Native-level proficiency in Japanese as used in Japan.

• Experience in data annotation, transcription, or language quality assurance.

• Solid foundation in linguistics or a related discipline.

• Capability to apply concepts of phonetics, prosody, and intonation when assessing speech and writing guidelines.

• High level of proficiency in written English.

• Skill in crafting clear, structured instructions and providing actionable feedback.

• Comfort with data and metrics, including inter-rater agreement scores, audit spreadsheets, and structured feedback templates.

• Self-motivated in managing feedback cycles, QA reviews, and data projects without close supervision.

• Availability of approximately 40 hours per week with flexible scheduling.

• Availability during certain US Pacific business hours for coordination meetings and real-time assistance.

• Must have authorization to work in your country of residence.

• Preferred: experience in writing or maintaining annotation guidelines or rubrics.

• Preferred: background in training, mentoring, or managing annotators.

• Preferred: familiarity with audio evaluation, TTS, or STT.

• Preferred: conversational spoken English proficiency for meetings and calibration syncs.

• Preferred: experience working with distributed, remote teams.

🏝️ Benefits

• Ongoing contractor engagement, subject to renewal by mutual agreement.

• Flexible scheduling options.

• Autonomy over methods for completing assigned tasks.

• Remote work setup.

• Competitive base salary.

• Attractive equity package (available only to US Employees and not applicable to this 1099 contract).

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• 9 weeks of paternity leave and 12 weeks of maternity leave (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• 401(k) plan (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• Monthly commuter allowance (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• Flexible PTO (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• Daily lunch, dinner, and snacks provided (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).

• Your own personal Yoshi (US Employees Only; not applicable to this contract).