Speech-Language Pathologist - Project Contract $75 USD/hour
Not accepting applications on crossover.com at this time.
Description
A five-year-old who says "thun" for "sun" is not misreading. Our reading app can't tell the difference yet, and children are paying for it. You can hear in two seconds what the software can't, and this project puts that ear where it matters, changing outcomes for thousands of kids at once.
Alpha School is a private school network where students master core academics in about two hours a day with AI tutors. Its youngest students learn to read in AlphaPhonics, an app that listens to them sound out letters and words. Right now it fails the children who most need patience. English learners get marked wrong for their accents. Children already in speech therapy get marked wrong word after word. One child lost every word with an S in it and his family stopped using the app.
The fix is data, and judgment the data doesn't have. A team of teachers is labeling about 40,000 recordings of children reading. You set the standard they label to. First, you write the guide and the reference examples, and you record a clear articulation video for every English phoneme. Then you spot-check the team's work and label the hard cases yourself in IPA. As the model retrains, your job shifts to reviewing what it still gets wrong and telling engineers why. A typical week: an hour fixing a guide rule the labelers keep splitting on, a batch of tricky /r/ and /l/ clips, and a call explaining to an engineer why a lateral lisp should not count as a misread.
This is not clinical work. There is no caseload, no IEPs, and no reports. It is fully remote, about 10 hours a week, on your own schedule. If you've ever wished the reading apps your students use understood how young children actually talk, apply and help build one that does.
What you will be doing
- Creating articulation videos for all English phonemes to support an early reading app
- Labeling student speech samples at the phoneme level (IPA), with careful attention to typical and atypical speech patterns in 4- to 6-year-olds
- Distinguishing age-appropriate developmental errors from true misreads, so the app responds the way a skilled early-childhood SLP would
- Writing and maintaining labeling guidelines so the dataset stays consistent across samples and annotators
- Reviewing the app's pronunciation-scoring outputs, flagging misses, and explaining them in terms engineers can act on
- Advising the product team on speech-sound norms and developmental progressions
What you will NOT be doing
- Providing therapy, evaluations, or IEP services
- Managing a caseload, writing clinical reports, or chasing productivity minutes
- Labeling all 40,000 recordings yourself (a team does the volume; you set the standard and handle the hard calls)
- Working with children or families directly
Key responsibilities
Make sure Alpha's reading app hears 4- to 6-year-olds the way a skilled pediatric clinician would.
Candidate requirements
- Master's degree in speech-language pathology and current ASHA CCC-SLP
- Hands-on experience treating articulation and phonological disorders in children ages 4 to 6
- Fluent in narrow IPA transcription of child speech
- Comfort working in AI tools and web-based labeling software
- Ability to explain speech-science concepts in plain language to engineers
- Available about 10 hours a week for 3 to 6 months
Nice to have
- Prior speech-data annotation or labeling for AI or speech-recognition systems
- Experience with bilingual children or dialects such as African American English and Spanish-influenced English
- Background in early literacy, phonics, or the science of reading
- Experience writing clinical protocols, rubrics, or training materials for other clinicians or aides
Applying for a role? Here’s what to expect.
Crossover's skill assessment process combines innovative AI power with decades of human research, to take the guesswork, human bias, and pointless filters out of recruiting high-performing teams.
Chat-style screening interview.
Cognitive aptitude test.
Prove real-world job skills.
Interview with the hiring manager.
Pass proctored test.
Accept job offer.
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