Language Lead - French

About the role

You will act as the definitive linguistic authority for French within the voice AI domain, owning all quality and language decisions end to end. This role requires you to manage the full lifecycle of language-specific work, from data intake through production monitoring, ensuring that French is represented with accuracy and rigor. You will serve as the central hub for all French-related inquiries, resolving ambiguities and setting the standard for how the language is handled across annotation and engineering teams. Your expertise will directly shape the behavior and performance of models that interact with real users in French. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy, balancing independent execution with structured collaboration during defined sync windows. This engagement is designed as an ongoing contractor relationship, allowing for continuity and deep institutional knowledge over time.

Key facts

What you'll do

Coordinate with the Human Evals Manager to align project deliverables, timelines, and success metrics for French language initiatives.

Answer questions from annotators regarding guidelines, edge cases, and language-specific challenges through a dedicated project communication channel.

Cascade updated feedback, revised instructions, and rubric modifications to annotators working on French language projects in a timely and clear manner.

Listen to annotated audio files and evaluate whether ratings and written feedback correspond accurately to the established rubric for French.

Provide ground truth assessments of TTS output, focusing on pronunciation correctness, prosodic naturalness, and overall fluency in French.

Identify gaps or inconsistencies in annotation guidelines and expand relevant sections to cover newly discovered edge cases in French usage.

Prepare and facilitate calibration meetings with annotators to align understanding and application of quality standards for French.

Hold scheduled office hours during active study periods so annotators can seek real-time clarification in French language matters.

Develop structured onboarding materials and reference resources to help new annotators understand French linguistic requirements and quality expectations.

Compose detailed QA reports that document annotation quality, calibration results, and specific examples for continuous improvement.

Review production audio involving French speech and flag any quality issues related to content, fluency, or appropriateness for downstream model training.

Investigate language-specific issues reported by customers, trace them to root causes, and propose actionable solutions for annotators and engineers.

Audit datasets for linguistic accuracy, completeness, and consistency, ensuring that French data meets the required standards for model training.

Write clear, structured instructions and deliver precise, actionable feedback to annotators to maintain high and stable language quality.

Requirements

You must be a native-level speaker of French as spoken in France, with an intuitive grasp of regional nuances and formal registers.

You must bring prior experience in data annotation, transcription, or language quality assurance to understand evaluation workflows.

You must possess a strong foundation in linguistics or a closely related field, enabling you to apply concepts such as phonetics, prosody, and intonation when assessing speech and refining annotation guidelines.

You must demonstrate strong written English proficiency, as all guidelines, feedback reports, and team communication are conducted in English.

You must be able to write clear, logically organized instructions and provide specific, actionable feedback to annotators working on French language tasks.

You must be comfortable working with data and metrics, including inter-rater agreement scores, audit spreadsheets, and structured feedback templates.

You must be self-directed and capable of managing feedback cycles, QA reviews, and data projects without close supervision or constant direction.

You must be authorized to work in your country of residence and comply with all relevant eligibility requirements for contractor engagement.

Nice to have

Previous experience writing or maintaining annotation guidelines or evaluation rubrics for language projects.

Experience training, mentoring, or managing other annotators to ensure consistent quality across teams.

Hands-on experience with audio evaluation, TTS, or speech-to-text technologies in real-world scenarios.

Proficiency in spoken English to participate effectively in meetings and calibration discussions when necessary.

Familiarity with working on distributed, remote teams using asynchronous and synchronous communication tools.

Practical notes

This engagement requires approximately 40 hours per week, with flexibility in scheduling to accommodate varying project demands. Participation in periodic coordination meetings during US Pacific business hours is mandatory to ensure alignment with cross-functional teams. The role is structured as a 1099 contract opportunity and does not include benefits such as health insurance, paid time off, or retirement contributions. Language Leads are responsible for controlling their own working methods, supplying their own equipment, and managing their own tax obligations. You must be authorized to work in your country of residence. Note that Cartesia participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with Form I-9 documentation as required by applicable law.