Sonic Audit Specialist – German at Mercor

Sonic Audit Specialist (German) | $41.50/hr | Worldwide Remote

Mercor is seeking native and near-native German speakers to audit AI training data for Amazon's Sonic audio collections. This is careful, detail-oriented listening and evaluation work — not content production. You will assess transcription accuracy and forced alignment quality, applying structured rubrics and writing clear English rationales for every judgment.

About the Role

You will work across two Amazon Sonic audit collections:

• Multilingual Transcription Audit: Listen to recordings of human or agent speech, review annotator-produced transcriptions, and determine whether they accurately capture what was said. Apply a fixed set of error codes, assign a pass/fail verdict, and write a concise rationale for each decision.
• Forced Alignment Audit: Review audio segmented at the word level by an automated system. Verify that start and end timestamps correctly match spoken words, and that reference transcriptions reflect the spoken form. Correct boundary errors by splitting, merging, adding, or removing segments as needed.

Both collections run at 5.00 audit hours per task. Every judgment requires a written explanation — this is quality-focused work, not high-volume throughput.

Who We're Looking For

• Native or near-native German (Germany variety): Born and raised in a German-dominant region, or fully fluent with 5+ years of residence there. This is a hard requirement.
• Strong English reading and writing: All conventions, error codes, and rationales are written in English. You must read detailed rulebooks and write clear, professional feedback.
• Disciplined rubric application: Ability to apply written standards consistently across hundreds of judgments. Prior experience in transcription, subtitling, localization, linguistic annotation, or QA is a strong advantage.
• Careful listening skills: Ability to distinguish similar sounds, identify word boundaries in continuous speech, and differentiate genuine acoustic ambiguity from clear annotator error.

Nice to Have

• Prior AI data annotation or model evaluation experience
• Background in phonetics or linguistics
• Experience with audio editing or waveform tools

What to Expect

You will listen, evaluate, and submit structured judgments. When errors are found, you will tag all applicable error codes and explain your reasoning in plain English — leading with critical errors so the basis for any failure is immediately clear. A short calibration phase precedes production work.