Lead NLP Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work flexibility

Health insurance

Bonuses and equity

Professional development budget

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking an experienced Lead NLP Engineer to spearhead NLP initiatives from design to deployment in a hybrid Klerksdorp-based role. You will guide engineers and researchers, tackle sentiment analysis, summarization, translation, and conversational AI while shaping technical strategy and ensuring scalable, robust systems.

The position requires leadership, deep NLP knowledge, and excellence in Python and DL frameworks, with hybrid work flexibility and collaboration across product

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS, AI, computational linguistics, or related field.
• 5+ years in NLP with a proven leadership track record.
• Strong Python and NLP library experience (NLTK, SpaCy, Transformers).
• Experience with DL frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Cloud deployment experience desirable (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Responsibilities

• Lead design and deployment of advanced NLP models and systems.
• Mentor and manage a team of NLP engineers and researchers.
• Define technical roadmap for NLP projects aligned with business goals.
• Develop NLP pipelines for text classification, NER, topic modeling, QA.
• Collaborate with product and software teams to deploy solutions.
• Stay current with NLP research and industry trends.
• Ensure scalability, performance, and robustness of deployments.
• Oversee data collection, annotation, and preprocessing for models.
• Present findings and project updates to stakeholders.

Skills

NLP leadership

Python proficiency

Team mentoring

Problem solving

Communication skills

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI/CL

Tools

NLTK

SpaCy

HuggingFace Transformers

TensorFlow

PyTorch

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

About the Role

Our client is seeking an experienced and innovative Lead NLP Engineer to spearhead their Natural Language Processing initiatives. This role, based in Klerksdorp, North West, offers a hybrid work model, combining collaborative in-office days with remote flexibility. You will be responsible for the design, development, and deployment of cutting‑edge NLP systems, tackling challenges in areas such as sentiment analysis, text summarization, machine translation, and conversational AI. This is a leadership position where you will guide a team of talented engineers and researchers, drive technical strategy, and contribute to groundbreaking projects that leverage the power of language understanding. You will work with complex linguistic data and large-scale models to build intelligent applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and implementation of advanced NLP models and algorithms.
• Manage and mentor a team of NLP engineers and researchers, fostering a culture of innovation.
• Define the technical roadmap for NLP projects and ensure alignment with business goals.
• Develop and optimize NLP pipelines for tasks such as text classification, named entity recognition, topic modeling, and question answering.
• Collaborate with product managers and software engineers to integrate NLP solutions into production systems.
• Conduct research into state‑of‑the‑art NLP techniques and evaluate their potential application.
• Ensure the scalability, performance, and robustness of deployed NLP systems.
• Oversee data collection, annotation, and preprocessing efforts for NLP models.
• Stay current with the latest academic research and industry trends in NLP and AI.
• Present technical findings and project updates to stakeholders.

Requirements

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in Natural Language Processing, with a strong portfolio of developed systems.
• Proven leadership experience managing technical teams.
• Deep understanding of NLP concepts, algorithms, and architectures (e.g., Transformers, BERT, GPT).
• Proficiency in Python and NLP libraries such as NLTK, SpaCy, Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for ML deployment is desirable.
• Excellent problem‑solving, analytical, and communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively in a hybrid work environment.

Benefits

• Opportunity to lead and shape critical AI initiatives.
• Competitive salary, bonuses, and equity options.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous professional development budget.
• Collaborative and innovative team culture.
• Hybrid work flexibility.
• Relocation assistance available if needed.