Linguist (Must Speak Indonesian And/or Malay) in England

This remote Linguist role focuses on applying advanced linguistic expertise to large-scale AI and natural language processing projects. You will analyse multilingual datasets, evaluate AI model outputs, and contribute to responsible AI initiatives, with a particular emphasis on Austronesian languages. The position suits a graduate-level linguist with 3 years of experience who is eager to collaborate with engineers and researchers, contribute to publications, and shape best practices for multilingual AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Perform detailed linguistic analyses on large datasets, with a focus on Austronesian and other language families.
• Conduct linguistic error analysis of AI model outputs, identifying the most frequent and severe error categories and proposing improvements.
• Write, refine, and maintain clear guidelines for human annotation and other AI projects, including translation and related tasks.
• Carry out typological and sociolinguistic research on a wide range of languages, highlighting their similarities and differences.
• Perform linguistic analyses to support Responsible AI initiatives, including the detection and characterisation of toxic language, hate speech, gender bias, and other cultural biases in massively multilingual settings.
• Conduct comprehensive literature reviews on topics related to natural language processing and linguistics, and summarise findings in a clear and accessible way.
• Compare the quality of linguistic deliveries from different vendors, identify error patterns, and provide actionable feedback for improvement.
• Offer expert guidance on all aspects of linguistic knowledge, including typology, morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics, classification, phonetics and phonology, pragmatics, writing systems, and corpus linguistics.
• Engage with and collaborate effectively with native speakers of various languages to support data collection, annotation, and validation.
• Communicate the results of linguistic analyses clearly to machine learning engineers, NLP specialists, software engineers, and research scientists.
• Work cross-functionally with technical and research teams, contributing linguistic insight to AI and NLP projects.
• Contribute to research papers and documentation related to AI, NLP, and linguistics, while avoiding conflicts of interest in machine translation, ASR, TTS, or LLM research.
• Independently manage complex requests, prioritise tasks, plan and track your work, and report progress in a structured manner.
• Apply basic Natural Language Processing techniques to real-world datasets and research questions.

Essential Skills

• Graduate degree in Linguistics or a closely related field (required).
• 3 years of relevant professional or research experience in linguistics or NLP-related work.
• Native speaker of a non-English language, preferably Indonesian, with a high level of proficiency in another Austronesian language.
• Broad knowledge of other languages within the Austronesian language family.
• Very strong grasp of key linguistic fields, including language typology, syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics (especially dialectology and discourse analysis), corpus linguistics, writing systems, pragmatics, and phonology.
• Some hands-on experience applying basic Natural Language Processing techniques.
• Ability to code in Python for data analysis and linguistic tasks.
• Ability to query databases using SQL.
• Strong written and spoken communication skills, particularly for business and research communication.
• Proven ability to work independently, including prioritising, planning, tracking work, and reporting progress.
• Ability to work under pressure and handle complex, ambiguous requests.
• Experience working cross-functionally with teams such as machine learning, NLP, software engineering, or data science.
• Experience collaborating with technical teams and contributing to research papers.
• Self-motivation and a proactive approach to problem solving.
• No known conflicts of interest in the fields of machine translation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), or large language model (LLM) research, to enable contribution to research papers.