Strategic Project Lead - Speech & Audio AI

Accountabilities

Lead end-to-end project delivery: Manage project scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, resource allocation, and risks to ensure speech and audio AI programs meet client expectations and delivery objectives.
Manage client relationships: Serve as a primary point of contact for client communications, status updates, workshops, project reviews, and escalations, maintaining alignment throughout the project lifecycle.
Translate requirements into operational workflows: Convert client objectives into clear annotation guidelines, project processes, tooling requirements, and quality standards that support consistent execution.
Monitor data quality and performance: Define, track, and analyze key quality metrics, including transcription accuracy, word error rate (WER), speaker diarization, and linguistic consistency.
Resolve quality and delivery challenges: Investigate data quality issues, clarify ambiguous requirements with clients, and implement corrective actions to improve project outcomes.
Provide speech and audio expertise: Advise clients and internal teams on workflow feasibility, evaluation methodologies, tooling options, and best practices across speech, audio, and conversational AI projects.
Develop operational standards: Create and maintain reusable guidelines, standard operating procedures (SOPs), quality assurance frameworks, and documentation to improve efficiency and scalability.
Support team development: Share domain knowledge, mentor Operations Specialists, and promote consistent execution and quality practices across project teams.
Contribute to business and capability development: Support project scoping, pilot programs, and new service development as speech recognition, voice agents, and other AI technologies evolve.
Drive continuous improvement: Identify opportunities to refine processes, strengthen quality controls, and adapt delivery approaches to emerging client needs and industry developments.
Requirements
Relevant professional experience: At least 1–2 years of experience in AI data operations, project coordination, project delivery, or a related field, ideally within generative AI or frontier AI environments.
Speech and language expertise: Practical familiarity with at least one speech, audio, language data, or conversational AI workflow.
Project and stakeholder management: Experience coordinating projects or workstreams, managing competing priorities, and communicating effectively with clients and internal stakeholders.
Data quality and annotation knowledge: Understanding of data annotation processes, quality assurance methods, and the importance of accuracy and consistency in AI training and evaluation datasets.
Requirements translation: Ability to transform client needs into actionable guidelines, operational workflows, evaluation criteria, and measurable quality expectations.
Analytical and problem-solving skills: Strong critical thinking, attention to detail, and the ability to investigate issues, resolve ambiguities, and make sound decisions in a fast-paced environment.
Organizational skills: Ability to manage multiple projects and deadlines while maintaining quality, accountability, and clear communication.
Interest in AI innovation: Curiosity about emerging AI developments and a genuine interest in the evolution of speech technologies, audio processing, and voice-agent applications.
Preferred speech and audio experience: Familiarity with automatic speech recognition (ASR), transcription, speaker diarization, acoustic annotation, or text-to-speech (TTS) evaluation.
Preferred conversational AI knowledge: Experience with voice-agent scripts, interactive voice response (IVR), dialogue design, conversational evaluation, or turn-taking analysis.
Preferred multilingual capabilities: Experience with localization, cross-language consistency, CJK languages, or low-resource languages is an advantage. Bilingual or multilingual proficiency, particularly in German or a Nordic language, is also desirable.
Collaborative mindset: Ability to work effectively across international teams, share knowledge, adapt to changing requirements, and maintain a strong focus on client satisfaction and delivery quality.
Benefits
Remote work: Flexibility to work remotely from the United States.
Full-time employment: A permanent opportunity to contribute to long-term AI projects and operational initiatives.
Cutting-edge AI projects: The opportunity to support the development, training, and evaluation of advanced AI models, speech recognition systems, and voice-agent technologies.
International collaboration: Work alongside talented professionals and global teams on projects serving clients across industries and geographies.
Professional development: Access to tools, resources, and opportunities to expand your technical knowledge, project management expertise, and AI domain capabilities.
Collaborative culture: Join an environment that values innovation, curiosity, humility, accountability, and shared success.
Meaningful impact: Help improve the quality and reliability of AI systems through high-quality data programs and scalable operational processes.