LLM NLP Architect — Principal (Remote)

Placements24; Durban; Hybrid; ZAR 1,800,000 - 3,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary package

Health insurance and benefits

Flexible remote work

Learning and development opportunities

Retirement plan and time off

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal NLP Engineer to join a global AI research team. The role is remote, offering the chance to shape next-generation NLP and LLM technologies across distributed platforms.

You will lead design and deployment of production-ready NLP systems, mentor engineers, and collaborate with data scientists and software engineers. A strong track record in transformer models, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and cloud delivery is essential.

Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in CS, computational linguistics, AI, or related field.
• 10+ years of NLP experience with at least 5 years in large-scale language models.
• Expertise in PyTorch or TensorFlow and NLP libraries (Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy).
• Experience building and deploying production NLP systems.
• Strong understanding of transformer architectures and attention mechanisms.
• Proficiency in Python and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP).
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to lead projects in a remote setting.
• Publications in top NLP/AI conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS) a plus.
• Experience working with teams in South Africa or with SA-based teams is beneficial but not mandatory.

Responsibilities

• Lead the research, design, and implementation of advanced NLP models with a focus on LLMs.
• Develop and fine-tune state-of-the-art NLP architectures for text generation, summarization, translation, and QA.
• Drive innovation in prompts, model interpretability, and ethical AI for LLMs.
• Collaborate with engineers and data scientists to integrate NLP into production systems.
• Evaluate and benchmark NLP models for high performance and robustness.
• Stay updated with the latest NLP/AI publications and advancements.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical excellence.
• Architect robust data pipelines for training large-scale language models.
• Communicate complex ideas and project status to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

NLP expertise

LLMs

Deep learning

Python programming

Research leadership

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in CS/Computational Linguistics/AI

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face Transformers

spaCy

AWS

GCP

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal NLP Engineer to join a global AI research team. The role is remote, offering the chance to shape next-generation NLP and LLM technologies across distributed platforms.

You will lead design and deployment of production-ready NLP systems, mentor engineers, and collaborate with data scientists and software engineers. A strong track record in transformer models, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and cloud delivery is essential.