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

About the Role The Strategic Project Lead – Speech & Audio will sit in Appen's Operations organization and support the development of frontier AI through high-quality data programs for leading AI companies. We’re looking for someone with experience in speech, audio, or language data to own complex projects from planning through delivery. You’ll combine project management, domain expertise, and quality ownership to help clients build and improve speech recognition systems, voice agents, and other AI applications. You’ll work closely with clients and internal teams to solve problems, refine workflows, and keep pace with a rapidly evolving AI landscape. 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 da