Lead NLP Engineer - Remote, AI Leader & Mentor

Placements24; Bellville; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Competitive compensation

Health benefits

Career growth opportunities

R&D resources

Job summary

Placements24 in South Africa seeks a visionary Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to spearhead AI initiatives in our client’s Centurion-based team, now fully remote. You will lead a talented group of ML engineers and data scientists, guiding end-to-end lifecycle from conception to production.

We require 7+ years in ML with NLP expertise, strong leadership, and hands-on Python & ML libraries. Expect impactful, high-scale projects, collaboration with product, and growth opportunities within a

Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, AI, or related field.
• 7+ years hands-on ML engineering with NLP specialization.
• Proven experience leading ML projects and teams.
• Expertise in Python and ML/NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK, transformers, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models and applications.
• Manage and mentor ML engineers and data scientists.
• Oversee ML lifecycle: data, preprocessing, training, evaluation, deployment.
• Drive NLP research and techniques (transformers, LLMs, sentiment, text gen).
• Collaborate with product managers to define NLP roadmaps and requirements.
• Ensure production NLP systems are scalable, reliable, and well-documented.
• Develop best practices for ML engineering and MLOps.
• Stay current with NLP/AI advancements and contribute to IP.

Skills

NLP

Machine learning

Leadership

Python

Cloud platforms

MLOps

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI

Tools

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Placements24 in South Africa seeks a visionary Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to spearhead AI initiatives in our client’s Centurion-based team, now fully remote. You will lead a talented group of ML engineers and data scientists, guiding end-to-end lifecycle from conception to production.

We require 7+ years in ML with NLP expertise, strong leadership, and hands-on Python & ML libraries. Expect impactful, high-scale projects, collaboration with product, and growth opportunities within a