Lead Data Scientist - NLP Specialist

Placements24; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Executive bonuses

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Annual leave and development allowance

Opportunity to present research at/con

Cape Town work environment

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist in Cape Town to spearhead advanced NLP initiatives. You will guide a team of data scientists in building and deploying NLP models to extract insights from textual data, improve customer understanding, and drive product innovation.

You will mentor teams, partner with product managers, and stay at the cutting edge of NLP research to deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that impact key business outcomes in a vibrant Cape Town environment.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD required in a quantitative field.
• 7+ years experience in data science with 4+ years NLP focus.
• Proven track record leading data science teams and projects.
• Strong programming and model deployment capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models for text tasks.
• Mentor a team of data scientists and provide technical leadership.
• Collaborate with product managers to identify NLP opportunities and value.
• Develop robust data pipelines for unstructured text processing at scale.
• Communicate complex findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Stay up-to-date with NLP and ML research to improve solutions.

Skills

NLP expertise

Python

Machine learning

Deep learning

Leadership

Education

Master's or PhD in Data Science

Master's or PhD in Computer Science

PhD in Computational Linguistics

Tools

NLTK

spaCy

Hugging Face Transformers

Spark

Hadoop

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

About the Role

Our client is seeking an accomplished Lead Data Scientist with a deep specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to spearhead their advanced analytics initiatives in Cape Town . In this leadership position, you will guide a team of talented data scientists in developing sophisticated NLP models to unlock insights from textual data, enhance customer understanding, and drive product innovation. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the strategic direction of data science within the organization and make a tangible impact on key business outcomes through data-driven decision‑making. You will foster a culture of scientific rigor and collaboration, working on complex, impactful projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and machine translation.
• Mentor and guide a team of data scientists, providing technical leadership and fostering their professional growth.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to identify opportunities for leveraging NLP to solve business problems and create value.
• Develop and maintain robust data pipelines for processing and analyzing large volumes of unstructured text data.
• Conduct in-depth exploratory data analysis and communicate complex findings clearly and concisely to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Stay current with the latest research and advancements in NLP and machine learning , applying them to improve existing solutions and develop new capabilities.

Requirements

• Master's or Ph.D. in Data Science, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in data science , with at least 4 years focused on NLP .
• Proven experience leading data science teams and projects.
• Expertise in Python and common NLP libraries (e.g., NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Strong understanding of statistical modeling, machine learning algorithms, and deep learning architectures for text data.
• Experience with big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Hadoop) and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and executive bonuses.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• Generous annual leave and personal development allowance.
• Opportunities to present research at industry conferences.
• An inspiring and innovative work environment in the vibrant city of Cape Town .