Principal NLP Scientist — AI Research & Leadership

Placements24; Durban; Hybrid; ZAR 1,500,000 - 2,100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Base salary including bonus and equity

Health insurance

Conferences and training

Research tools access

Job summary

Placements24 seeks a Principal Data Scientist with a focus on NLP to lead advanced research and development in Durban. The role drives state‑of‑the‑art NLP models and scalable AI solutions across products and services.

You will mentor a team of researchers and engineers, collaborating with product teams to translate linguistic challenges into practical implementations. A PhD and deep expertise in NLP are required.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, AI or related field with NLP focus.
• Extensive production NLP model development and deployment experience.
• Deep expertise in transformer architectures and LLMs.
• Strong Python programming and NLP library experience (NLTK, SpaCy).
• Proven ability to lead research projects and mentor junior staff.
• Experience with large-scale data processing and distributed computing.
• Excellent analytical and communication skills.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• Lead research and development of advanced NLP models including transformers and LLMs.
• Design end-to-end NLP solutions for sentiment, summarization, translation, QA.
• Develop state-of-the-art algorithms for semantic understanding and information extraction.
• Mentor and guide a team of data scientists and engineers.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to integrate NLP capabilities.
• Evaluate and benchmark NLP models for performance and accuracy.
• Stay current with NLP breakthroughs and publish findings.

Skills

NLP

Transformers

Python

Mentoring

Education

PhD in CS / AI / NLP

Tools

Hugging Face

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Placements24 seeks a Principal Data Scientist with a focus on NLP to lead advanced research and development in Durban. The role drives state‑of‑the‑art NLP models and scalable AI solutions across products and services.

You will mentor a team of researchers and engineers, collaborating with product teams to translate linguistic challenges into practical implementations. A PhD and deep expertise in NLP are required.