Linguist

This is a remote position.

• Perform linguistic analyses on large datasets.
  
• Perform linguistic error analysis of AI model outputs, determining what the most frequent and severe error categories are.
  
• Write and revise guidelines for human annotation and other AI projects, including but not limited to translation tasks.
  
• Conduct typological and sociolinguistic research on a large number of 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.
  
• Compare the quality of deliveries between vendors, 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 in various languages.
  
• Communicate results of linguistic analyses to engineers and research scientists.
  

Requirements

Skills:

• Must have strong written and spoken communication skills, especially business and research communication.
  
• Must have:
  
• Near-native or native proficiency in a language other than English, more specifically a language of the following families or groups: Dravidian or Bantu (Swahili is a plus);
  
• Near-native or native proficiency in English.
  
• Working knowledge in other languages is a plus. Proficiency in a low-resource language is valued.
  
• Must be able to code in Python (must) and query databases using SQL, other coding languages used for data analysis are a plus.
  
• 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
  
• education or training in the basics of project management is a plus
  
• self-motivation is a must
  
• Working knowledge of international language-classification standards is valued.
  

Education:

• PhD in Linguistics or related field is a must be finished (not in progress)
  
• a background or specialisation in corpus linguistics is a plus
  
• experience with field work is a plus
  
• a graduate degree in Literature or English is not an appropriate substitution
  
• degree in Computer Science with a specialisation in NLP is not an appropriate substitution
  
• 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

• Years of experience: 0-3
  
• Experience working cross-functionally
  
• Experience collaborating with machine learning, NLP, or software engineers, or data scientists
  
• Experience contributing to research papers
  
• Important: Preferably no known conflicts of interest in the fields of machine translation, ASR, TTS, or LLM research (as FAIR Linguists need to be contributing to research papers)
  

Benefits

• Competitive salary
  
• Healthcare contribution and inclusion in company pension scheme
  
• Work laptop and phone
  
• 25 days annual leave (pro-rata) plus paid bank holidays
  
• Expanding workforce with potential for career progression for top performers.