Principal Data Scientist (NLP)

Hudson Singapore; Singapore; On-site; SGD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Hudson Singapore is seeking a Principal NLP Scientist to lead hands-on NLP, LLM, and AI automation initiatives in a new global engineering setup in Singapore. You will design, research, and improve NLP capabilities for production business systems, focusing on NER, text classification, generation, semantic search, and information extraction.

The role requires 8+ years in ML/NLP, strong PyTorch and Transformers skills, and hands-on experience with RAG and model serving.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master's in CS/ML/AI/Computational Linguistics/Data Science.
• At least 8 years of professional experience in ML, AI, or NLP.
• At least 5 years building NLP models for production or near-production systems.
• Deep understanding of neural networks (RNN/CNN/Transformers) and attention mechanisms.
• Experience with NLP tasks such as NER, classification, text generation, semantic search, and information extraction.
• Strong experience with LLMs, prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, and safe production usage.
• Hands-on Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with ONNX or model serving formats.
• Data preparation, labeling workflows, and model evaluation metrics.
• Experience with Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, SQL databases.
• Experience with Azure or AWS.
• Applicants MUST BE currently based in Singapore and have relevant work experience in Singapore.

Responsibilities

• Lead design of NLP solutions for production systems.
• Conduct applied research and develop NLP/LLM capabilities.
• Architect practical NLP workflows and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver impact.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Transformers

NLP

LLM

RAG

Pandas

NumPy

SQL

Azure

AWS

Education

PhD or Masters in CS/ML/AI/CL/Data Science

Tools

Hugging Face

ONNX

Job description

Principal-Level Individual Contributor / Technical Leader

Hands-on NLP, LLM, RAG & AI Automation Position

Our client is a global Supply Chain Solution provider and is now building a new Global Engineering Organization in Singapore to strengthen internal software delivery, improve production ownership, and build long-term engineering capability. They are now looking for a Principal NLP Scientist to serve as a senior technical leader responsible for designing, researching, and improving advanced Natural Language Processing and Large Language Model capabilities for production business systems.

This role combines applied research, hands-on model development, technical architecture, and practical product impact. The successful candidate will lead the design of NLP solutions for named entity recognition, text classification, text generation, semantic search, information extraction, and other language-driven automation use cases.

Requirement:

• PhD or Master in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, or a closely related technical field.
• At least 8 years of professional experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, or NLP.
• At least 5 years of hands-on experience building NLP models for production or near-production systems.
• Deep understanding of modern neural network architectures, including RNN, CNN, Transformer-based architectures, attention mechanisms, embeddings, fine-tuning strategies, layers, modules, and loss functions.
• Strong practical experience with NLP tasks such as NER, classification, text generation, semantic similarity, information extraction, and document understanding.
• Strong experience with Large Language Models, including model evaluation, prompt design, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, and safe production usage.
• Practical understanding of RAG, GraphRAG, knowledge graphs, embeddings, and hybrid retrieval approaches for production LLM applications.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python, PyTorch, and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with ONNX or other model optimization / model serving formats.
• Strong understanding of data preparation, data quality, labeling workflows, annotation guidelines, and model evaluation metrics.
• Practical experience with Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, Matplotlib, SQL databases, and structured business data.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or AWS.
• Ability to design experiments, define success metrics, compare model approaches, and explain trade-offs clearly.
• Applicants MUST BE currently based in Singapore and has relevant work experience in Singapore.