Remote Principal ML Engineer - Lead AI Pipelines & Strategy

Placements24; Stellenbosch; Hybrid; ZAR 1,300,000 - 2,150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

Remote-first culture

Competitive salary + bonus

Health benefits

Job summary

WhatJobs Direct is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer for a fully remote role. You will lead end-to-end ML development, design scalable pipelines, and apply state-of-the-art algorithms to real-world problems.

You will mentor junior engineers and shape our AI strategy across teams. The ideal candidate holds a PhD or Master’s in a quantitative field and 7+ years of hands-on ML experience with Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and Spark.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science, ML, AI, Statistics or related quantitative field.

Responsibilities

• Lead end‑to‑end development and deployment of ML models.
• Design and optimize scalable ML pipelines and infrastructure.
• Research and apply state‑of‑the‑art ML algorithms and techniques.
• Collaborate with data scientists and software engineers to productionize models.
• Mentor junior engineers and data scientists, promote ML best practices.
• Evaluate models, run A/B tests, iterate for accuracy and efficiency.
• Stay abreast of ML and AI research developments.
• Develop monitoring for ML models in production.
• Contribute to the company’s AI/ML strategy.
• Ensure ethical and responsible AI development and deployment.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders.

Skills

PhD or Master’s in ML/CS

7+ years ML engineering

Python

ML libraries

ML algorithms

MLOps

Cloud platforms

Spark

Software engineering

Leadership

Communication

Education

PhD in CS/ML/AI/Stats

Master’s in related field

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

MLOps tooling

Spark

Job description

WhatJobs Direct is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer for a fully remote role. You will lead end-to-end ML development, design scalable pipelines, and apply state-of-the-art algorithms to real-world problems.

You will mentor junior engineers and shape our AI strategy across teams. The ideal candidate holds a PhD or Master’s in a quantitative field and 7+ years of hands-on ML experience with Python, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and Spark.