Lead Machine Learning Engineer - NLP Focus

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

About the Role

Join a pioneering tech company as a Lead Machine Learning Engineer with a specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the vibrant city of **Cape Town**. This is an exciting opportunity to lead a team of talented engineers and researchers in developing and deploying sophisticated NLP solutions that power innovative products. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction, driving best practices, and ensuring the successful implementation of cutting‑edge NLP models. This position is based in **Cape Town, Western Cape**, offering a fully remote work experience to qualified candidates.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models and systems.
• Manage and mentor a team of machine learning engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and technical excellence.
• Architect scalable and robust ML pipelines for data processing, model training, and inference.
• Collaborate closely with product teams to understand requirements and translate them into effective AI solutions.
• Conduct research on state‑of‑the‑art NLP techniques and evaluate their applicability to business problems.
• Implement and optimize algorithms for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, machine translation, and question answering.
• Ensure the quality, performance, and reliability of deployed ML models.
• Contribute to the development of internal tools and libraries to streamline ML workflows.
• Stay updated with the latest research trends and industry best practices in NLP and ML.

Requirements

• Master's or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• Extensive experience (5+ years) in machine learning engineering, with a strong focus on NLP.
• Deep understanding of NLP concepts, algorithms, and frameworks (e.g., NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Proficiency in Python and experience with ML libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Proven experience in leading technical projects and mentoring engineering teams.
• Experience with MLOps practices, including model deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and system design.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) is highly desirable.
• Familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and their applications.

Benefits

• Competitive salary package and potential for equity.
• Flexible remote working environment.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
• Generous professional development budget for conferences and courses.
• Opportunities to work on challenging and impactful projects.
• A collaborative and inclusive company culture.
• Performance bonuses and recognition programs.