Linguistic Data Operations Manager
Build India’s sovereign AI stack for a billion people and shape the future of technology
Job Summary
The Linguistic Data Operations Manager will be responsible for scaling and managing a pool of ~200 freelancers across 22 Indian languages and for setting up and running data validation and model evaluation workflows in collaboration with Linguist leads for different models. This role requires strong project/operations management skills, with enough linguistic awareness to design processes that support annotation, evaluation, and corpus digitization at scale. This work will directly contribute to making India’s AI ecosystem linguistically inclusive and globally competitive.
Key Responsibilities
- Freelancer & Vendor Operations:
- Manage multilingual data pipelines across 22 Indian languages covering diverse languages, scripts, and data formats.
- Build, train, and manage a pool of 200+ freelance linguists and language experts.
- Create, launch, and manage crowdworking projects to scale annotation, validation, and evaluation tasks efficiently across multiple Indian languages.
- Design scalable workflows for freelancer onboarding, training, task assignment, tracking, and payment.
- Implement quality assurance processes (spot checks, inter-annotator agreement, sampling audits).
- Ensure compliance with data security and confidentiality standards across freelancer workflows.
- Monitor throughput, ensure deadlines are met. Set and maintain operational dashboards and cadence reviews (weekly/monthly) with leadership to ensure visibility into quality, throughput, and cost.
- Oversee freelancer payout tracking and project budget utilization to maintain cost efficiency within allocated budgets.
- Represent the operations perspective in the design and enhancement of internal language data platforms, ensuring tools align with large-scale annotation and validation needs.
- Data Validation & Model Evaluation Workflows:
- Operationalize workflows for validating training data (speech and text).
- Collaborate with linguist leads to align freelancer outputs with model evaluation and annotation needs.
- Deliver predictable, validated datasets and evaluation outputs for integration into model training.
- Cross-functional Collaboration:
- Work closely with linguist leads, ML engineers, and product teams to balance scale, cost, and quality.
- Provide structured reporting on throughput, quality, and budget utilization to leadership.
Minimum Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Technology, or related field OR equivalent experience in linguistic data operations with 2+ years of experience in project or operations management, preferably in linguistic data annotation, or AI/ML data workflows.
Required Expertise
- Proven track record of managing large distributed teams (freelancers, vendors, or contractors).
- Experience with quality assurance, metrics tracking, and process optimization.
- Experience with tools such as Airtable, Jira, Asana, or annotation platforms is a must.
- Familiarity with linguistic data annotation/evaluation concepts (not deep expertise, but awareness).
- Strong project management and organizational skills.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
- Ability to design scalable processes and anticipate operational risks.
- Proficiency with productivity tools (spreadsheets, dashboards, task management software).