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

Appen

About The Position

The Strategic Project Lead – Speech & Audio sits in Appen’s Operations organization and supports frontier AI development through high-quality data programs for leading AI companies. The role owns complex speech, audio, or language data projects from planning through delivery, combining project management, domain expertise, and quality ownership to support speech recognition systems, voice agents, and other AI applications. The position works closely with clients and internal teams to solve problems, refine workflows, and adapt to changes in the AI landscape. The role is responsible for end-to-end project delivery, including scope, timelines, budgets, staffing, and risks. It translates client requirements into annotation guidelines, workflows, tooling, and quality standards; defines and monitors quality metrics; troubleshoots quality issues; and advises on feasibility, evaluation methods, and tooling for speech and audio workflows. It also develops reusable guidelines, SOPs, and QA frameworks, mentors Operations Specialists, and supports project scoping, pilots, and capability development as speech and voice AI evolves.

Requirements

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 ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-moving environment.
Interest in current AI developments and the evolution of speech, audio, and voice-agent technologies.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end project delivery across 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 speech and audio domain expertise, 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.