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

About the role

Appen's Strategic Project Management team is central to the company's growth strategy, partnering with leading AI companies and frontier model developers to deliver the data that makes models work. As Strategic Project Lead - Finance, you will run strategic finance pilots and research projects for financial AI model training and evaluation, from initial scoping through to operationalization. This is a hands-on role bridging customer objectives, financial expertise, and Appen's global delivery capability.

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.