Principal NLP Engineer - Dialogue Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote work arrangement

Health insurance

Generous annual leave

Professional development budget

Retirement savings plan

Access to collaboration tools

Job summary

WhatJobs Direct is seeking a Principal NLP Engineer with deep expertise in dialogue systems to lead advanced NLP initiatives in a fully remote role. You will design, develop and deploy conversational AI, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product teams to define NLP features for new services.

The ideal candidate holds a Master’s or Ph.D. in a relevant field, 5+ years in NLP, and strong experience with Python, NLP libraries, and DL frameworks, delivering production-ready models at scale.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS, computational linguistics, AI or related field.
• 5+ years of NLP experience focusing on dialogue systems.
• Proficiency with Python and NLP libraries (NLTK, spaCy, Transformers).
• Experience with DL frameworks (TensorFlow or PyTorch) and LLMs.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement NLP models for conversational AI and dialogue management.
• Lead development of scalable dialogue systems including intent recognition.
• Collaborate with product teams to define NLP features for new products/services.
• Research and evaluate new NLP techniques, tools, libraries to improve performance.
• Develop and maintain data pipelines for training and evaluating NLP models; ensure data quality.
• Mentor junior NLP engineers and contribute to team growth.
• Optimize NLP models for production with latency/resource constraints.
• Contribute to AI strategy and research roadmap.

Skills

NLP expertise

Dialogue systems

Remote team leadership

Python programming

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/Computational Linguistics/AI

Tools

NLTK

spaCy

Transformers

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

About the Role

Our client, WhatJobs Direct, a leader in the AI & Emerging Technologies sector, is seeking a Principal NLP Engineer with deep expertise in dialogue systems to join their innovative team. This fully remote position offers the chance to work on groundbreaking natural language processing projects from anywhere, contributing to the next generation of intelligent conversational agents. You will play a key role in designing, developing, and deploying advanced NLP solutions that power cutting‑edge user experiences. This is an exciting opportunity to lead and innovate in a field experiencing exponential growth, with a company committed to pushing the boundaries of AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) models and algorithms, particularly for conversational AI and dialogue management.
• Lead the development of robust and scalable dialogue systems, including intent recognition, entity extraction, and response generation.
• Collaborate with product teams to define NLP features and requirements for new products and services.
• Research and evaluate new NLP techniques, tools, and libraries to improve model performance and efficiency.
• Develop and maintain data pipelines for training and evaluating NLP models, ensuring high-quality data.
• Mentor junior NLP engineers and contribute to the team's technical growth.
• Optimize NLP models for deployment in production environments, considering latency and resource constraints.
• Contribute to the overall AI strategy and research roadmap.

Requirements

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in NLP, with a strong focus on dialogue systems, chatbots, or virtual assistants.
• Expertise in Python and common NLP libraries such as NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers.
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Experience with large language models (LLMs) and their application in dialogue.
• Solid understanding of machine learning principles, algorithms, and evaluation metrics.
• Proven ability to work independently and lead complex technical projects in a remote setting.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across distributed teams.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and performance-based incentives.
• Fully remote work arrangement, offering flexibility and work-life balance.
• Comprehensive health insurance package.
• Generous annual leave and paid time off.
• Professional development budget for courses, conferences, and certifications.
• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects with leading technologies.
• Retirement savings plan.
• Access to virtual collaboration tools and a supportive remote team culture.