Lead NLP Engineer: Conversational AI & ML Team Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Salary commensurate with experience

Health and wellness benefits

Generous annual leave

Professional development opportunities

Relocation assistance

Access to advanced compute resources

Job summary

WhatJobs Direct in Durban is seeking a Lead NLP Engineer to guide the development of conversational AI, chatbots, and virtual assistants. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers to deliver cutting-edge NLP solutions and scale deployments.

The role requires a strong background in ML/NLP, leadership, and hands-on Python, with experience on cloud platforms. You will collaborate with product teams and contribute to innovative projects in AI.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Linguistics, AI, or related field with NLP focus.
• 7+ years of NLP and ML experience, with leadership on technical projects.
• Deep understanding of NLP libraries (NLTK, spaCy, HF Transformers).
• Experience building scalable NLP systems and chatbots.
• Strong Python skills and ML toolchain.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and implementation of NLP models and algorithms.
• Build and deploy scalable conversational AI systems, including chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice interfaces.
• Manage and mentor a team of NLP engineers and data scientists, fostering technical excellence and collaboration.
• Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of NLP projects, from data collection and preprocessing to model training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to define NLP features and project roadmaps.
• Stay current with the latest advancements in NLP, deep learning, and conversational AI research.
• Develop and maintain robust APIs and integration points for NLP services.
• Ensure the performance, scalability, and reliability of deployed NLP systems.
• Conduct rigorous testing and validation of NLP models to ensure accuracy and user satisfaction.
• Contribute to the company's intellectual property through innovation and publication.

Skills

Leadership

NLP

Machine Learning

Python

Deep Learning

Transformers

Cloud platforms

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI/NLP

Tools

NLTK

spaCy

Hugging Face Transformers

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

Job description

WhatJobs Direct in Durban is seeking a Lead NLP Engineer to guide the development of conversational AI, chatbots, and virtual assistants. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers to deliver cutting-edge NLP solutions and scale deployments.

The role requires a strong background in ML/NLP, leadership, and hands-on Python, with experience on cloud platforms. You will collaborate with product teams and contribute to innovative projects in AI.