Lead NLP Engineer, Conversational AI Leader

Placements24; Kempton Park; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Medical coverage

Retirement fund

Leave allowances

Training & conferences

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead NLP Engineer in Gauteng to spearhead conversational AI initiatives. You will lead a team of NLP engineers, shape architecture for dialogue management, intent recognition, and sentiment analysis, and drive production deployments from model training to inference.

Based in Tembisa, the role requires hands-on problem solving and close collaboration with product managers to translate requirements into technical specs, ensure performance, and stay at the forefront of NLP

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• 5+ years hands-on NLP engineering, with a focus on conversational AI development.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams and managing complex projects.
• Deep understanding of NLP concepts: tokenization, embeddings, sequence modeling, transformers.
• Proficiency in Python and NLP libraries such as Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, NLTK.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of NLP models for conversational AI.
• Architect robust data pipelines for training and inference.
• Mentor NLP engineers and guide their professional development.
• Collaborate with product managers to define requirements and translate to specs.
• Evaluate NLP models for performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Stay at the forefront of NLP research (LLMs, transformers, dialogue systems).
• Drive best practices in software engineering, including version control and CI/CD.

Skills

NLP engineering

Team leadership

Python

Hugging Face Transformers

spaCy / NLTK

Cloud deployment

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/Computational Linguistics

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead NLP Engineer in Gauteng to spearhead conversational AI initiatives. You will lead a team of NLP engineers, shape architecture for dialogue management, intent recognition, and sentiment analysis, and drive production deployments from model training to inference.

Based in Tembisa, the role requires hands-on problem solving and close collaboration with product managers to translate requirements into technical specs, ensure performance, and stay at the forefront of NLP