Head of NLP Engineering, Remote - Cape Town (Equity)

Placements24; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary package

Flexible remote working

Health & wellness benefits

Professional development budget

Performance bonuses

Job summary

Placements24 in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP to lead a team of engineers and researchers in building cutting-edge NLP solutions. This role focuses on defining technical direction, deploying models, and collaborating with product teams.

You should have a PhD or Master's in CS/AI, 5+ years in ML engineering with NLP, and expertise in Python, TensorFlow or PyTorch, and libraries like Hugging Face. Remote-friendly with strong leadership opportunities.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in CS/AI or related field; 5+ years of ML engineering with NLP focus.
• Strong Python, ML framework experience (TensorFlow/PyTorch) and NLP libraries.
• Proven track record leading technical ML projects and mentoring teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of NLP models and systems.
• Mentor and manage ML engineers; drive best practices and code quality.
• Architect scalable ML pipelines for data processing, training, and inference.
• Collaborate with product teams to translate requirements into AI solutions.
• Research state-of-the-art NLP techniques and assess business applicability.
• Ensure model quality, performance, and reliability in production.
• Contribute to internal ML tooling and libraries; stay updated on trends.

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, or related field

Tools

Hugging Face Transformers

spaCy

NLTK

Job description

Placements24 in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP to lead a team of engineers and researchers in building cutting-edge NLP solutions. This role focuses on defining technical direction, deploying models, and collaborating with product teams.

You should have a PhD or Master's in CS/AI, 5+ years in ML engineering with NLP, and expertise in Python, TensorFlow or PyTorch, and libraries like Hugging Face. Remote-friendly with strong leadership opportunities.