Remote Principal NLP Engineer | AI & ML Leader

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

Benefits offered by this job

Highly competitive salary and bonus

Comprehensive health benefits

Generous paid time off

Continuing learning opportunities

Global distributed team

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Remote Principal Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP. You will lead the design and deployment of large-scale NLP models, guide a distributed team, and drive research that shapes our AI roadmap.

This remote role targets top talent globally and offers collaboration across product, data, and engineering teams. You will mentor engineers, optimize ML pipelines, and stay ahead of NLP innovations while delivering production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• Minimum 8 years of experience in machine learning engineering with a strong NLP focus.
• Proficiency in Python and core NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Transformers).
• Experience with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Keras and ML pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and deployment of large-scale NLP models and systems.
• Drive R&D in text classification, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, translation, and conversational AI.
• Develop robust, scalable ML pipelines for training and inference, production-ready.
• Collaborate with product managers and software engineers to integrate NLP into production.
• Mentor junior engineers and promote best practices in ML engineering.
• Evaluate and implement state-of-the-art NLP techniques and tools.
• Optimize model performance and inference speed for production environments.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and technical strategy for the AI/ML team.
• Stay current with NLP and ML research advancements.

Skills

NLP expertise

Python

Deep learning

Transformers

SpaCy

NLTK

Cloud platforms

Git

CI/CD

Leadership

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI

Tools

spaCy

NLTK

Transformers

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Keras

AWS

Azure

GCP

Git

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Remote Principal Machine Learning Engineer specializing in NLP. You will lead the design and deployment of large-scale NLP models, guide a distributed team, and drive research that shapes our AI roadmap.

This remote role targets top talent globally and offers collaboration across product, data, and engineering teams. You will mentor engineers, optimize ML pipelines, and stay ahead of NLP innovations while delivering production-ready solutions.