Remote Principal NLP Engineer — Lead, Build & Innovate

Placements24; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and bonus

Health and wellness benefits

Generous paid time off

Learning opportunities and conferences

Global distributed team

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a remote Principal Machine Learning Engineer with a specialization in NLP to lead the design and deployment of large-scale NLP models. You will mentor engineers, drive NLP research, and align ML initiatives with product goals across a globally distributed team.

The role offers a fully remote work setup, competitive salary with bonus, and robust learning opportunities. Pretoria, Gauteng base noted, but candidates may work remotely worldwide.

Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in machine learning engineering, with a strong focus on NLP.
• Proven ability to build and deploy production NLP models.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their ML services.
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals, statistics, and algorithm design.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Experience leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and implementation of large-scale NLP models and systems.
• Drive research and development in text classification, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, machine translation, and conversational AI.
• Develop and maintain robust, scalable ML pipelines for training and inference.
• Collaborate with product managers and software engineers to productionize NLP models.
• Mentor junior ML 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.

Skills

NLP engineering

Python

Software engineering

CI/CD

Git

Communication

Project leadership

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in CS/AI/NLP

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

HuggingFace Transformers

spaCy

NLTK

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a remote Principal Machine Learning Engineer with a specialization in NLP to lead the design and deployment of large-scale NLP models. You will mentor engineers, drive NLP research, and align ML initiatives with product goals across a globally distributed team.

The role offers a fully remote work setup, competitive salary with bonus, and robust learning opportunities. Pretoria, Gauteng base noted, but candidates may work remotely worldwide.