Natural Language Processing Engineer

shortlistd.io; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

shortlistd.io is seeking a Principal NLP Scientist to lead advanced NLP/LLM initiatives across our production systems in Amsterdam or Munich. You will bridge applied research and product impact, turning state-of-the-art NLP into reliable, scalable workflows for electronic supply chains.

You will collaborate with engineers, data teams, and product managers to design, evaluate, and deploy NLP models, RAG pipelines, and semantic search while mentoring junior teammates and driving measurable

Qualifications

• PhD in CS, ML, NLP, or a closely related field.
• 8+ years in machine learning, AI, or NLP.
• 5+ years deploying NLP models to production.
• Strong understanding of modern neural architectures (Transformers, RNNs, CNNs).
• Experience with NER, text classification, text generation, semantic search, and document understanding.
• Deep experience with LLMs, evaluation, prompt design, fine-tuning, and RAG deployments.
• Proficient in Python; PyTorch; Transformers; ONNX and model serving formats.
• Experience with SQL and data querying; cloud platforms (Azure or AWS).
• Excellent written and verbal English communication; able to mentor juniors.

Responsibilities

• Define research and technical direction for NLP/LLM across platforms.
• Design, evaluate, and scale NLP solutions for production systems.
• Lead design and deployment of LLMs, RAG pipelines, and semantic search.
• Collaborate with software/data engineers and product teams to automate language-driven workflows.
• Design rigorous experiments, establish baselines, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders.
• Lead data annotation standards, model validation, and training data strategy.

Skills

Python

NLP fundamentals

Technical leadership

English communication

Education

PhD in CS/ML/NLP

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

ONNX

Job description

Principal NLP Scientist

• Location: Amsterdam or Munich
• Employment Type: Full-time

About Us

Our client is a premier global distributor of electronic components and an end-to-end supply chain solutions provider.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal NLP Scientist to serve as a senior technical leader and individual contributor directly reporting to the CTO. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, researching, and improving advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities for our core production business systems. You will bridge the gap between applied research and practical product impact—transforming state-of-the-art NLP technologies into reliable, measurable, maintainable, and highly efficient production workflows that power the future of electronic supply chains.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define the scientific and technical direction for NLP and LLM capabilities across our internal platforms and operational workflows. Provide expert guidance on what is technically viable, reliable, and production-ready.
• Model Development & Applied Research: Design, evaluate, and scale NLP solutions for named entity recognition (NER), text classification, text generation, semantic search, document understanding, and information extraction.
• LLM & RAG Integration: Lead the design and deployment of Large Language Models, hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and GraphRAG architectures.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with software engineers, data engineers, product managers, data analysts, and data annotation teams to build, evaluate, and constantly refine language-driven automation systems.
• Experimentation & Quality: Design rigorous, measurable experiments, establish evaluation baselines, define success metrics, compare model approaches, and clearly communicate the trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Data Strategy: Lead standards for training data preparation, annotation strategy, labeling guidelines, and model validation quality.
• Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and guidance to help mentor and grow junior machine learning and NLP team members.

What This Role Does Not Own

• General IT infrastructure, end-user technical support, or manual data entry processes.
• Sole ownership of product priorities or business requirements (Product Management owns business prioritization, backlog structure, and stakeholder alignment).

Required Qualifications (Must-Haves)

• Education: PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, or a closely related technical field.
• Experience:
  • 8+ years of professional experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, or NLP.
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and maintaining NLP models for production or near-production systems.
• Deep Neural Architectures: Strong understanding of modern neural network architectures, including RNN, CNN, Transformer-based architectures, attention mechanisms, embeddings, fine-tuning strategies, layers, modules, and loss functions.
• Core NLP Tasks: Practical experience with NER, text classification, text generation, semantic similarity, and document understanding.
• LLM & RAG Expertise: Deep experience working with Large Language Models, including model evaluation, prompt design, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, and deployment for safe production usage.
• Technical Stack:
  • Strong hands-on coding skills in Python.
  • Strong experience with PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers.
  • Experience with ONNX or other model optimization / model serving formats.
  • Proficiency with standard data libraries: Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, and Matplotlib.
  • Experience working with SQL databases and querying structured business data.
• Cloud & Tools:
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure or AWS) and experience working within Agile software engineering workflows.
• Leadership & Communication: Ability to provide technical leadership and mentor junior engineers without requiring formal people management authority. Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience leading NLP or AI research initiatives within a commercial, production-focused environment.
• Experience with multilingual NLP systems.
• Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search architectures, and knowledge graph concepts (including LLM integration with graph databases like Neo4j, FalkorDB, or similar).
• Knowledge of model serving, monitoring, drift detection, and production ML observability tools.
• Experience with Docker, containerized ML workloads, and modern MLOps / CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working directly with data annotation teams to draft high-quality labeling instructions.
• Experience with .NET / C#, ASP.NET Core, or integrating ML services into enterprise software platforms.
• Academic publications, patents, or recognized public technical contributions in NLP, ML, or applied AI.