BCforward is currently seeking a highly motivated Linguist for an opportunity New York, NY OR Burlingame, CA or Redmond WA (Hybrid - 3 days onsite) (Need someone who is authorized to work independently without any sponsorship).
Position Title: Linguist
Location: New York, NY OR Burlingame, CA or Redmond WA (Hybrid - 3 days onsite)
Anticipated Start Date: ASAP
Please note this is the target date and it is subject to change. BCforward will send official notice ahead of a confirmed start date.
Expected Duration: 06 Months
Job Type: Full Time (>=40 HRS WEEKLY) – Contract
Authorization: Must be authorized to work without sponsorship.
Job Description:
Bachelor's degree required.
We are looking for a linguist to help develop language components for AI-powered products, including large language models (LLMs) and voice-enabled technologies. We are seeking candidates with solid linguistic data analysis skills, programming familiarity, and language technology experience to contribute to data collection, synthetic data generation, and annotation tasks in support of LLM/AI training, evaluation, alignment, and AI agent development.
Job Responsibilities
- Apply linguistic expertise in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics to support LLM and generative AI systems
- Collaborate with linguists, data operations teams, and ML engineers on data collection, curation, annotation, and localization efforts for model training and fine-tuning
- Contribute to the development and maintenance of annotation schemas and guidelines for LLM training data (e.g., instruction-tuning, preference labeling, RLHF)
- Evaluate and quality-check datasets used for pre-training, fine-tuning, and alignment of language models
- Support the development of programmatic methods for generating synthetic annotated data at scale
- Assist in model evaluation efforts including prompt-based testing, red-teaming, and linguistic error analysis
- Participate in experiments to assess data quality, annotation consistency, and downstream model performance
Top 3 must-have HARD skills:
- 1+ years of experience in Linguistics, Language Technologies, NLP, or AI/ML data operations (or equivalent)
- Knowledge of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and other areas of linguistics
- Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs), their applications and data practices (training data, evaluation, prompting, fine-tuning)
- Exposure to LLM evaluation methodologies (human evaluation, automated metrics, adversarial testing)
- Experience working with semantic ontologies, taxonomies, or intent/slot frameworks
- Proficiency using AI Agents/Chatbots
- Experience with database queries and data analysis processes (SQL, spreadsheets, R, Unix, or others)
Good to have skills:
Preferred Qualifications
- Native or near-native fluency in English and at least one additional language
- Master's degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Technologies, or a related field
- Familiarity with machine learning frameworks, NLP libraries, and tools (e.g., Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK, PyTorch)
- Exposure to statistical language modeling or training data pipelines
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
- Experience working with speech and text data in multiple languages
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment with evolving priorities
