Lead NLP Engineer - Cape Town Language AI Innovator

Placements24; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellness benefits

Pension plan

Life insurance

Paid annual leave

Job summary

Placements24 in Cape Town, Western Cape, seeks a Lead NLP Engineer to drive our NLP initiatives across conversational AI, analytics, and translation platforms. You will guide a team, shape the roadmap, and partner with product and engineering teams to deliver robust NLP features.

The ideal candidate holds a Master’s or PhD in CS or Computational Linguistics, 5+ years in production NLP, and deep knowledge of transformers and attention.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience designing and deploying production NLP systems.
• Expertise in transformers, LLMs, and attention mechanisms.
• Proficient in Python and NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Hugging Face, PyTorch/TensorFlow).
• Experience leading engineering teams and managing projects.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable NLP systems.
• Architect data pipelines for model training and deployment for NLP tasks.
• Mentor and guide a team of NLP engineers.
• Collaborate with product management to define NLP features.
• Evaluate new NLP technologies to enhance capabilities.
• Ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of NLP models.
• Conduct code reviews and maintain high code quality.
• Stay updated with NLP research and advancements.
• Develop and maintain documentation for NLP systems.

Skills

NLP system design

Team leadership

Python programming

Analytical problem solving

Excellent communication

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science / Computational Linguistics

Tools

SpaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Azure

Job description

Placements24 in Cape Town, Western Cape, seeks a Lead NLP Engineer to drive our NLP initiatives across conversational AI, analytics, and translation platforms. You will guide a team, shape the roadmap, and partner with product and engineering teams to deliver robust NLP features.

The ideal candidate holds a Master’s or PhD in CS or Computational Linguistics, 5+ years in production NLP, and deep knowledge of transformers and attention.