Chief NLP Research Scientist (Remote)

Placements24; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work with flexible timezone

Performance-based bonuses

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Professional development opportunities

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead AI Research Scientist to head our NLP initiatives from a fully remote setup. You will guide a team of researchers and engineers, shape the NLP roadmap, and translate breakthroughs into production-ready features across sentiment analysis, translation, summarization, and conversational AI.

You will publish findings, stay at the forefront of NLP and ML advances, and foster an inclusive remote research culture with strong collaboration across time zones.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or a related field with NLP focus.
• 7+ years NLP research experience, with at least 3 years in leadership.
• Proven track record deploying advanced NLP models (Transformers, LLMs, BERT, GPT).
• Experience with cloud platforms for model training and deployment.
• Strong communication and collaboration in distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead R&D of state-of-the-art NLP models and algorithms.
• Mentor a team of AI researchers and engineers.
• Define the NLP research roadmap aligned with the company's strategy.
• Oversee design, implementation, and evaluation of NLP experiments.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to productionize breakthroughs.
• Publish research findings in top AI conferences and journals.
• Stay updated on NLP, ML, and DL advances.
• Develop and maintain best practices for AI R&D in remote settings.

Skills

Leadership

NLP expertise

Transformers

Python

Cloud exposure

Education

PhD in CS/AI

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

JAX

Hugging Face

spaCy

NLTK

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead AI Research Scientist to head our NLP initiatives from a fully remote setup. You will guide a team of researchers and engineers, shape the NLP roadmap, and translate breakthroughs into production-ready features across sentiment analysis, translation, summarization, and conversational AI.

You will publish findings, stay at the forefront of NLP and ML advances, and foster an inclusive remote research culture with strong collaboration across time zones.