NEW JOB OPENING
LINGUIST
IN Remote, USA!

Educational Requirements:

• Graduate degree in Linguistics or related field is a must; PhD is a plus

• A graduate degree in Literature or English is not an appropriate substitution

• A background or specialization in corpus linguistics is a plus

• Experience with field work is a plus

• Must have a very firm grasp of the following linguistic fields: language typology, syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics (especially dialectology and discourse analysis), corpus linguistics, writing systems, pragmatics, phonology.

• Must have some experience with applying basic Natural Language Processing techniques

• Experience working cross-functionally

• Experience collaborating with machine learning, NLP, or software engineers, or data scientists

• Experience contributing to research papers



Must-Have Skills:

• 3+ years of experience applying strong theoretical linguistics skills to language technology

• Must have native or near-native proficiency / fluency in Portuguese (especially Brazilian)

• Must be able to code in Python (must) and query databases using SQL, other coding languages used for data analysis (e.g., R) are a plus

• Ability to handle lots of stress-testing and red-teaming exercises (toxic language that pops up)



Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Working knowledge in other languages is a plus; proficiency in a low-resource language is valued

o Education or training in the basics of project management is a plus

o Self-motivation is a must

• Working knowledge of international language-classification standards is valued

• Project Management experience – working a lot with vendors

• Ability to track projects, estimate whether workload the vendor is assessing is correct or not



Soft Skills:

• Must have strong written and spoken communication skills, especially business and research communication

• Must be able to independently work through complex requests and perform under pressure

• Strong ability to work independently, prioritize, plan, and track work, as well as report progress

• Ability to ask questions when needed (researcher mentality)

• Extremely good / impeccable English communication (does not need to be a Native speaker)



The main function of a Linguist is to determine speech data needs and setting strategic vision for data-based model and product improvements.

Candidate Value Proposition:

The individual will be joining a team that has been working on 200 language systems, which has made the nature journal and stamped as the universal translator. This is a great experience for individuals interested in translation or language technology!



Role Responsibilities (including, but not limited to):

• Perform linguistic analyses on large datasets

• Perform linguistic error analysis and quality assessment on AI model outputs, determining what the most frequent and severe error categories are

• Write and revise guidelines for human annotation, translation and dataset creation projects

• Conduct typological and sociolinguistic research on many languages, highlighting their similarities and differences

• Perform linguistic analyses for Responsible AI (toxic language, hate speech, gender bias and other cultural biases) in massively multilingual settings

• Conduct linguistic literature reviews on various NLP-adjacent topics and summarize findings

• Evaluate the quality of human translations or human-generated data, identify error patterns, and provide actionable feedback

• Provide information or guidance relative to any aspect of linguistic knowledge (typology, morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics, classification, phonetics/phonology, pragmatics, etc.)

• Reach out to and collaborate with native speakers of various languages

• Communicate results of linguistic analyses to engineers and research scientists



Performance Measurement:

Performance is measured on how well this individual completes work packages.



Past FAIR projects that have been strongly supported by our Linguistics group

• No Language Left Behind (text-to-text machine translation for 200 languages)

o Demonstrated non-English-centric translation capabilities for low-resource languages

o Constituted a scientific breakthrough published in Nature

o Currently powers the UNESCO translator on Hugging Face

• Seamless (speech-to-speech translation for 100 languages)

o Demonstrated expressive translation capabilities for 100 languages

o Was included in the Time's 200 Best Inventions (2023)



Skills Assessment:

• 1st Round – Technical interview with CWAM + linguist engineer, 1 hour

o Applying theoretical linguistics to various situations

o Second part of first round is being able to show coding skills in Python (databases, sometimes queries in SQL, mostly Python)

• 2nd Round – Behavioral, 30-45 mins

• **Only those lawfully authorized to work in the designated country associated with the position will be considered.**

• **Please note that all Position start dates and duration are estimates and may be reduced or lengthened based upon a client’s business needs and requirements.**