Japanese Team Lead

In this hourly, remote contractor role, you will work as a Japanese Quality Assurance Lead (QAL) to oversee quality, consistency, and trainer performance across Japanese AI training projects. You will review AI-generated Japanese content and trainer/QA work, evaluate output quality against project guidelines, provide precise written feedback, and ensure that all contributors follow the expected quality standards.

You will assess work for accuracy, fluency, grammar, spelling, tone, cultural appropriateness, meaning preservation, instruction-following, formatting, and adherence to project-specific rubrics. You will spot recurring quality issues, communicate updates to trainers and QAs, support onboarding, maintain documentation, and help activate contributors who are not working consistently.

This role is with SME Careers, a fast-growing AI Data Services company and subsidiary of SuperAnnotate, delivering training data for many of the world’s largest AI companies and foundation-model labs. Your Japanese quality leadership will directly help improve the world’s premier AI models by ensuring that Japanese training data is natural, accurate, culturally appropriate, well-documented, and aligned with client expectations.

Selection process involves an AI interview, a domain-specific task, and an interview with a recruiter.

Important: There is no immediate project for this role; however, if qualified, you will be among the first experts we reach out to when relevant opportunities arise. This will also provide you with access to future projects available through our expert network.

What you'll do

• Spot-check Japanese items, identify quality issues, provide feedback through DMs, and escalate recurring or critical issues.
• Update trainers and QAs on Discord about guidelines, project changes, workflow updates, and quality expectations.
• Respond to questions around Japanese grammar, keigo, register, kana/kanji usage, translation fidelity, cultural context, terminology, and edge cases.
• DM inactive contributors, encourage activation, track follow-ups, and flag availability issues.
• Create and maintain Japanese documentation, style guides, trackers, FAQs, quality notes, examples, honeypots, and onboarding materials.
• Run onboarding/training calls to explain workflows, rubrics, quality standards, and Japanese-specific requirements.
• Ensure all trainers and QAs apply Japanese language guidelines consistently.
• Identify recurring quality gaps and build scalable QA processes.

What we're looking for

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Japanese, Linguistics, Translation, Communications, Journalism, English, Education, Quality Assurance, or a relevant domain/related field.
• Native or near-native Japanese proficiency, with strong reading and writing skills.
• Strong grasp of the English language to follow project guidelines, communicate with teams, and provide clear feedback in English.
• 3+ years of professional experience in Japanese writing, editing, translation, localization, content QA, AI training, education, annotation, or related language-review workflows.
• Strong understanding of Japanese grammar, kana/kanji usage, punctuation, keigo, tone, register, honorifics, cultural context, and Japan-specific localization.
• Ability to evaluate Japanese content against detailed rubrics and identify issues such as mistranslation, literal phrasing, unnatural tone, incorrect keigo, ambiguous references, hallucinated claims, or inconsistent terminology.
• Experience leading or supporting remote teams of trainers, annotators, reviewers, editors, or QAs is strongly preferred.
• Comfortable with Discord, Google Sheets, Google Docs, trackers, dashboards, and project management systems.
• Highly detail-oriented and organized, with the ability to maintain style guides, FAQs, trackers, onboarding materials, honeypots, and documentation.
• Experience with AI training, data annotation, LLM evaluation, prompt/response evaluation, or rubric-based LLM QA is a strong plus.