AI Research Linguist – NLP, Data & Multilingual AI - Global Tech For Good Products

12-Month Contract Inside IR35 - Renewable | London, UK (Remote)

About the Opportunity

We are seeking a highly analytical, PhD-qualified AI Research Linguist to join a leading global technology organisation working at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, multilingual research and advanced language technologies.

This role sits at the intersection of Linguistics, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on evaluating and improving AI systems through linguistic research, large-scale dataset analysis and multilingual model evaluation.

You will work closely with research scientists, machine learning engineers, data scientists and native-language specialists to investigate how AI systems understand, interpret and generate human language across diverse linguistic communities.

This is not a traditional translation, interpretation or localisation position. It is a research-focused opportunity for someone who combines strong theoretical linguistics knowledge with practical Python, SQL and data analysis capabilities.

The Ideal Candidate

A PhD-qualified linguistics researcher with practical data science skills, capable of independently analysing large multilingual datasets, developing evaluation frameworks and assessing the performance of advanced AI systems.

You will be comfortable working with complex research questions, analysing linguistic patterns, interpreting AI model outputs and communicating findings to technical and research teams.

Key Responsibilities

AI Research & Model Evaluation

• Analyse large linguistic datasets and identify common and critical errors in AI-generated outputs.
• Evaluate AI systems across multilingual language understanding, reasoning and generation tasks.
• Build, test and improve AI evaluation and challenge datasets.
• Investigate machine translation, linguistic reasoning, spontaneous speech, debate and tutoring, and pronoun resolution.

Linguistic Research & Multilingual Data

• Conduct linguistic, typological and sociolinguistic research, particularly across low-resource and massively multilingual languages.
• Develop and maintain guidelines for human annotation and translation tasks.
• Collaborate with native speakers and multilingual research specialists to assess language quality and accuracy.
• Identify linguistic patterns, inconsistencies and challenges affecting AI performance across different languages.

Data Analysis & Technical Research

• Read, modify and run Python data science notebooks.
• Work with Python libraries and tools, particularly pandas.
• Query, analyse and validate structured datasets using SQL.
• Investigate linguistic data quality and communicate research findings to technical teams.

Responsible AI & Research Quality

• Support Responsible AI research, including the analysis of toxic language, hate speech and gender bias.
• Evaluate linguistic and cultural considerations affecting AI-generated content.
• Review and assess the quality of work delivered by external language and data vendors.
• Independently manage complex research requests, prioritise tasks and track progress.

Essential Requirements

• Completed PhD in Linguistics or a closely related discipline. In-progress PhDs will not be considered.
• Strong research-level understanding of General Linguistics theory.
• 2–3 years of relevant professional and/or research experience.
• Strong practical Python skills, including the ability to read, modify and run data science notebooks.
• Experience with pandas and Python-based data analysis workflows.
• Working knowledge of SQL and database querying.
• Experience analysing linguistic datasets or conducting quantitative linguistic research.
• Ability to independently manage ambiguous and complex research requirements.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain linguistic findings to engineers and research scientists.
• Strong organisation, prioritisation, project management and time-management skills.
• Self-motivated, adaptable and comfortable working under pressure.
• Ability to work effectively in multilingual and low-resource language research environments.

Desirable Experience

Experience in one or more of the following areas would be advantageous:

• Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI model evaluation.
• Machine translation and multilingual AI.
• AI/ML evaluation and benchmark dataset development.
• Linguistic reasoning and language understanding.
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and spontaneous speech analysis.
• Linguistic annotation and language data quality.
• Typological and sociolinguistic research.
• Responsible AI, AI safety, hate speech, toxicity and bias analysis.

Education

Mandatory: Completed PhD in Linguistics or a closely related discipline.

Candidates with an incomplete or in-progress PhD will not meet the academic requirements for this position.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

• Contribute to advanced multilingual AI research and development.
• Work at the intersection of linguistics, data science and artificial intelligence.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary research and engineering teams.
• Influence the evaluation, accuracy and quality of next-generation AI systems.
• Apply advanced linguistic research to real-world AI challenges.

Interested? Apply for immediate cnsideration

If you have a completed PhD in Linguistics or a related discipline, practical Python and SQL skills, and an interest in applying linguistic research to advanced AI systems, we would welcome your application.

Please apply with your latest CV showing all your relevant to this job skills, experience, knowledge and email your CV with daily rate/gross annualised salary expectations, availability to interview and start this job

marina.economidou@templeton-recruitment.com

Marina Economidou, Executive Solutions Consultant