Lead NLP Engineer — Mentor Teams, Deliver Production AI

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation package

Health and retirement benefits

Training and conferences

Centurion, Gauteng office environment

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking an experienced Lead Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP in Centurion, Gauteng. You will lead a team to develop and deploy advanced NLP models, from research to production, shaping the tech direction of our AI initiatives.

The role requires strong NLP expertise, leadership, and hands-on coding in Python using spaCy, Hugging Face, and common DL frameworks, with cloud experience and a drive to deliver production-ready systems.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS/AI/linguistics or related field.
• 5+ years hands-on ML engineering experience with NLP focus.
• Proficiency in Python and ML libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Transformers, scikit-learn).

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models and applications (sentiment analysis, text classification, translation, chatbots).
• Mentor and guide ML engineers and data scientists.
• Define and implement ML development and deployment pipelines (MLOps).
• Collaborate with product managers to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Research new NLP techniques to enhance offerings.
• Optimize models for performance, scalability, and reliability.

Skills

NLP specialist experience

Python

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

scikit-learn

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

MLOps

Leadership

Production ML systems

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics, or related field

Tools

Python

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

scikit-learn

TensorFlow

PyTorch

AWS

Azure

GCP

MLOps tools

Job description

Placements24 is seeking an experienced Lead Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP in Centurion, Gauteng. You will lead a team to develop and deploy advanced NLP models, from research to production, shaping the tech direction of our AI initiatives.

The role requires strong NLP expertise, leadership, and hands-on coding in Python using spaCy, Hugging Face, and common DL frameworks, with cloud experience and a drive to deliver production-ready systems.