Remote Lead ML Engineer - FinTech Innovator

Placements24; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 1,990,000 - 3,151,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote role

Stock options

Generous annual leave

Online learning opportunities

Distributed team culture

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to drive innovation and deploy AI-driven solutions for fintech products. This fully remote role requires mentoring a team of ML engineers and collaborating with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to translate business needs into scalable ML systems.

You will research and implement advanced ML techniques for fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer insights, while building robust pipelines and ensuring production

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS, ML, AI, statistics.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience deploying ML models.
• Experience leading ML projects or teams.
• Strong Python programming and ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn).
• Experience with Spark, Hadoop and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Solid understanding of ML algorithms and their finance applications.
• Excellent software engineering fundamentals and problem-solving.
• Exceptional communication in distributed teams; collaboration is key.
• Experience with MLOps tools and CI/CD for ML models.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of scalable ML models.
• Mentor a team of ML engineers in technical excellence.
• Collaborate with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to define requirements.
• Research state-of-the-art ML algorithms for finance problems.
• Develop robust ML pipelines: preprocessing, training, evaluation, monitoring.
• Ensure performance and reliability of ML systems in production.
• Contribute to the company’s AI/ML strategy and roadmap.
• Stay updated on ML advances and advocate adoption.
• Drive MLOps practices and model versioning/CI-CD.

Skills

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

Spark

Hadoop

AWS

Azure

GCP

MLOps

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML/AI/Statistics

Tools

MLflow

Kubeflow

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer to drive innovation and deploy AI-driven solutions for fintech products. This fully remote role requires mentoring a team of ML engineers and collaborating with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to translate business needs into scalable ML systems.

You will research and implement advanced ML techniques for fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer insights, while building robust pipelines and ensuring production