AI Research Scientist - NLP Focus

Placements24; Bloemfontein; Hybrid; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Conference budgets

Flexible remote work

World-class resources

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking an exceptional AI Research Scientist specializing in NLP to join a fully remote, globally distributed team. You will lead fundamental and applied NLP research, designing state-of-the-art models and evaluating them across diverse tasks.

You will publish findings in top-tier venues, mentor juniors, and contribute to production-ready research prototypes while collaborating with researchers and engineers worldwide.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics or closely related field with strong NLP publications.
• 5+ years of NLP research experience with expertise in transformers, RNNs, and seq2seq models.
• Ability to design and implement complex NLP systems and perform rigorous experiments.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Experience with large language models (LLMs) and applications.
• Strong mathematical and statistical foundations.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Ability to work independently and remotely.

Responsibilities

• Conduct fundamental and applied NLP research across language modeling, MT, text generation, sentiment analysis, and QA.
• Design and evaluate novel deep learning architectures for NLP tasks.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to deploy prototype systems.
• Stay updated with NLP and AI advancements via literature and communities.
• Publish research results in leading AI/NLP conferences and journals.
• Develop production-ready code for experiments and prototypes.
• Mentor junior researchers and interns and present findings to teams.

Skills

NLP research

Transformer models

Experimental design

Communication

Education

PhD in CS/AI/linguistics

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

About the Role

Our client, a globally recognized leader in AI research and development, is seeking an exceptional AI Research Scientist with a specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to join their innovative, fully remote team. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking research that pushes the boundaries of human-computer interaction and language understanding. You will be involved in exploring novel NLP techniques, developing state-of-the-art models, and publishing research findings in top-tier conferences and journals. As a remote-first company, we provide a flexible and stimulating work environment that fosters creativity and collaboration among our distributed team of world-class researchers and engineers. If you are passionate about understanding and generating human language through AI, this role in South Africa is for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct fundamental and applied research in various areas of Natural Language Processing, including but not limited to language modeling, machine translation, text generation, sentiment analysis, and question answering.
• Design, implement, and evaluate novel deep learning architectures and algorithms for NLP tasks.
• Collaborate with other researchers and engineers to develop and deploy prototype systems based on research findings.
• Stay current with the latest advancements in NLP and AI through literature review and participation in academic communities.
• Publish research results in leading AI/NLP conferences and journals.
• Develop and maintain high-quality, production-ready code for research experiments and prototypes.
• Mentor junior researchers and interns, providing guidance on research projects.
• Present research findings to internal teams and external audiences.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, or a closely related field with a strong publication record in NLP.
• 5+ years of research experience in Natural Language Processing, demonstrating deep expertise in areas such as transformer architectures, recurrent neural networks, and sequence-to-sequence models.
• Proven ability to design and implement complex NLP systems and conduct rigorous experimental evaluations.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with large language models (LLMs) and their applications.
• Strong mathematical and statistical foundations.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex research ideas clearly.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a remote setting.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and research-focused compensation package.
• Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous allowance for professional development, including conferences and workshops.
• Cutting-edge research environment with access to significant computational resources.
• Flexible remote work arrangements.
• Opportunity to make significant contributions to the field of AI and NLP.
• Work with a team of world-renowned researchers.