Natural Language Processing Engineer

Zest for Tech; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 260,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Equity participation

Unlimited PTO

Learning and development allowance

Job summary

Zest for Tech in New York City is seeking a Senior NLP Engineer to shape production NLP systems. You will design, implement, and deploy scalable NLP solutions, focusing on retrieval, embeddings, and LLM-driven apps.

The role is based in Lower Manhattan with a three-day-week onsite schedule. Ideal candidates have 2+ years in production NLP, strong Python, and hands-on experience with Hugging Face, spaCy, PyTorch, and Elasticsearch.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of NLP production experience.
• Strong Python engineering skills.
• Experience with NLP/ML frameworks and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Enhance search and retrieval systems using advanced NLP techniques.
• Build pipelines that process and analyse unstructured data (text/tables/documents).
• Design and deploy entity extraction and text classification models.
• Improve context-aware systems with embeddings, retrieval, and external data sources.
• Experiment with and fine-tune models for robustness and accuracy.
• Contribute to language models and agentic LLM applications for real-world use.

Skills

Python

NLP

ML frameworks

Embeddings

RAG techniques

LLM applications

Elasticsearch

Graph databases

Tools

Hugging Face

spaCy

NLTK

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Senior NLP Engineer | NYC 3 day/week in their Lower Manhattan office | up to $260k

We're working with a well-funded startup with strong product-market fit and backing from top-tier VCs. Having proven their product in the market, they're now focused on scaling. This role is an opportunity to shape how advanced NLP systems get designed, built, and shipped to production at a key inflection point for the company.

What you'll do

• Enhance search and retrieval systems using advanced NLP techniques
• Build pipelines that process and analyse unstructured data, including text, tables, and documents
• Design and deploy entity extraction and text classification models
• Improve context-aware systems by integrating embeddings, retrieval, and external data sources
• Experiment with and fine-tune models to improve robustness and accuracy
• Contribute to language models and agentic LLM applications tailored for real-world use

What you'll bring

• Strong Python engineering skills and experience with NLP/ML frameworks such as Hugging Face, spaCy, NLTK, PyTorch, or TensorFlow
• Hands-on experience with information retrieval and search technologies, including vector embeddings, graph databases, and Elasticsearch
• Familiarity with RAG techniques and building LLM-powered applications
• Around 2+ years working with NLP in production environments
• Solid understanding of how to take models from prototype to scalable systems
• Bonus: experience training or fine-tuning proprietary models, or developing complex agentic workflows

What's on offer

• $150k to $260k base + equity
• Fully covered healthcare
• Unlimited PTO
• Annual allowance for learning and development

If you want to help scale applied NLP systems beyond research into real-world impact, this is the opportunity.