Logo for appen

Strategic Project Lead - Speech & Audio AI (United States)

appen

Role overview

Qualifications

  • 1–2+ years of experience in AI data operations, project coordination, or delivery
  • Hands-on familiarity with at least one speech, audio, language, or conversational AI workflow
  • Experience coordinating projects or workstreams, managing stakeholders, and communicating with clients
  • Understanding of data quality, annotation workflows, and quality assurance methods

Responsibilities

  • Own end-to-end delivery across project scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, and risks
  • Manage client communication, status updates, workshops, and escalations
  • Translate client requirements into annotation guidelines, workflows, tooling, and quality standards
  • Define and monitor quality metrics, including transcription accuracy, word error rate (WER), diarization, and linguistic consistency

Key facts

  • Remote from: United States
  • Full time
  • Senior (5-10 years)
  • Project Lead
  • German

Hard skills

Other skills

  • Quality Assurance
  • Problem Solving
  • Multitasking

About the company

appen logo

appen

  • AI & Machine Learning
  • Scaleup
  • 501–1,000
We help our clients enhance their best-in-class products and services around the world, including search engines, social media platforms, voice recognition systems, sentiment analysis, and eCommerce sites. All of that wouldn’t be possible without our team of more than 1 million flexible workers. The world of tech is moving fast, and we help our clients meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. We take pride in our diverse, international team and the flexible and full-time opportunities we offer. Remote work is changing how the world does business, and we’re proud to be pioneers in the movement. If you’re looking for a work-from-home opportunity, join us! At Appen, our team is an international force to be reckoned with. Operating in over 130 countries and working in more than 180 languages and dialects, we support the work of some of the world’s top technology companies. With Appen, you’ll get to work on innovative projects and grow your skills – all on your own schedule. Please be aware that Appen recruiters will only reach out to you via official channels (e.g., directly from @appen.com email addresses, or through our recruiters who are noted as such on LinkedIn). If you have suspicions about an interaction, ask for official email communications from an @appen.com. We will never ask you to send money to apply or start a job with us. We will also never send a check in advance. We will never ask you to send personal identifiable information outside of our secure job site, Appen Connect. All job applications should be submitted through our Jobs page to the applicable site.
See all jobs

Your match analysis

See how your profile stacks up against this role.

We compared the job requirements to your profile to show where you're strong and where you fall short.

Job description

About the Role

The Strategic Project Lead – Speech & Audio will sit in Appen's Operations organization and support the development of frontier AI through high-quality data programs for leading AI companies. We’re looking for someone with experience in speech, audio, or language data to own complex projects from planning through delivery. 

You’ll combine project management, domain expertise, and quality ownership to help clients build and improve speech recognition systems, voice agents, and other AI applications. You’ll work closely with clients and internal teams to solve problems, refine workflows, and keep pace with a rapidly evolving AI landscape. 


Your Impact
  • Own end-to-end delivery across project scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, and risks.
  • Manage client communication, status updates, workshops, and escalations.
  • Translate client requirements into annotation guidelines, workflows, tooling, and quality standards.
  • Define and monitor quality metrics, including transcription accuracy, word error rate (WER), diarization, and linguistic consistency.
  • Troubleshoot quality issues and resolve ambiguous requirements with clients.
  • Provide domain expertise across speech and audio workflows, advising on feasibility, evaluation methods, and tooling.
  • Build reusable guidelines, SOPs, and QA frameworks while mentoring Operations Specialists.
  • Support new project scoping, pilots, and capability development as speech and voice AI evolves. 

    • What You Bring
  • 1–2+ years of experience in AI data operations, project coordination, or delivery, ideally in a GenAI or frontier AI environment.
  • Hands-on familiarity with at least one speech, audio, language, or conversational AI workflow.
  • Experience coordinating projects or workstreams, managing stakeholders, and communicating with clients.
  • Understanding of data quality, annotation workflows, and quality assurance methods.
  • Ability to turn client requirements into clear guidelines, workflows, and quality standards.
  • Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment.
  • Interest in current AI developments and how speech, audio, and voice-agent technologies are evolving. 

    • Nice to Have
  • Experience with ASR transcription, speaker diarization, acoustic annotation, or TTS evaluation.
  • Familiarity with voice-agent scripts, IVR, dialogue design, turn-taking, or conversational evaluation.
  • Experience with localization, cross-locale consistency, CJK languages, or low-resource languages.
  • Bilingual or multilingual capabilities, particularly German or a Nordic language. 

    • Why You'll Love Working Here

    At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality AI solutions for frontier models.

    You'll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You'll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.


    About Appen Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.

    Related jobs

    Logo for appen

    Strategic Project Lead - AI Post-Training (United States)

    appen · Today

    Remote from United States · Full time

    Logo for appen

    Strategic Project Lead - Multimodal AI (United States)

    appen · Today

    Remote from United States · Full time

    Logo for ePATHUSA, Inc.

    Project Lead / Project Manager

    ePATHUSA, Inc. · 1 day ago

    Remote from United States · Fixed term

    Logo for Force Therapeutics

    Implementation Project Lead

    Force Therapeutics · 4 days ago

    Remote from United States · Full time

    Logo for Apkudo, Inc.

    Technical Solutions Project Lead

    Apkudo, Inc. · 8 days ago

    Remote from United States · Full time

    See all Project Lead jobs

    Other jobs at appen