Lead ML Engineer (NLP) - Build Production-Grade AI

Placements24; George; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Retirement plan with company matching

Paid time off

Training budget

Modern office in George

Wellness programs

Team events

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to drive the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models in George, Western Cape. You will lead a team of ML engineers and data scientists, shaping product roadmaps and ML strategy.

The role requires 5+ years in ML with 2+ years in leadership, strong Python and ML library expertise, and a track record of delivering production-grade systems using MLOps.

Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD in CS/AI/linguistics or related field.
• 5+ years in ML engineering with at least 2 years in a leadership role.
• Expertise in NLP including transformers, LSTMs, and word embeddings.
• Proficiency in Python and ML libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, NLTK, spaCy).
• Experience deploying production ML systems with MLOps.
• Strong software engineering practices including version control, testing, CI/CD.
• Excellent leadership and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of scalable ML models focusing on NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, summarization, QA).
• Mentor a team of ML engineers and data scientists, fostering collaboration and high performance.
• Architect robust ML pipelines for data ingestion, training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business units to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Conduct research into new NLP techniques and evaluate their potential.
• Ensure quality, reliability, and performance of deployed ML systems.
• Contribute to the ML strategy and technology roadmap.
• Stay updated with latest ML/NLP advancements.

Skills

NLP expertise

Team leadership

Communication

Collaboration

Research

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI/linguistics

Tools

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

scikit-learn

NLTK

spaCy

MLOps

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to drive the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models in George, Western Cape. You will lead a team of ML engineers and data scientists, shaping product roadmaps and ML strategy.

The role requires 5+ years in ML with 2+ years in leadership, strong Python and ML library expertise, and a track record of delivering production-grade systems using MLOps.