Remote Principal NLP Scientist — Research & Deployment

Placements24; Centurion; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement contributions

Paid time off

Conference attendance budget

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Principal NLP Scientist for a fully remote role based in South Africa. You will lead cutting-edge NLP research, develop production-ready language models, and mentor a team of researchers and engineers.

The role emphasizes publishing results and shaping the strategic NLP roadmap. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate breakthroughs into practical features, while staying aligned with industry trends and academic leadership.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or related field with a strong publication record in NLP.
• 8+ years of experience in Natural Language Processing research and development.
• Proven expertise with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) and NLP libraries (Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, NLTK).
• Experience designing, training, and deploying large-scale NLP models.
• Strong understanding of linguistic theories and computational approaches to language.
• Excellent programming skills in Python and proficiency with data science tools.
• Ability to lead research projects, manage timelines, and mentor junior team members.
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead research and development efforts in Natural Language Processing, focusing on text generation, sentiment analysis, information extraction, and question answering.
• Design, implement, and evaluate novel NLP algorithms and models using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques (Transformers, LLMs).
• Mentor and guide a team of NLP researchers and engineers, fostering innovation and technical expertise.
• Collaborate with product teams to translate research breakthroughs into practical AI features and products.
• Publish research findings in top-tier academic conferences and journals.
• Stay at the forefront of NLP research and identify emerging trends and opportunities.
• Develop and maintain scalable and efficient NLP pipelines and infrastructure.
• Contribute to the strategic roadmap for NLP development within the organization.

Skills

NLP research

Lead research

Mentoring

Publications

Education

PhD in CS / Computational Linguistics / AI

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face Transformers

spaCy

NLTK

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Principal NLP Scientist for a fully remote role based in South Africa. You will lead cutting-edge NLP research, develop production-ready language models, and mentor a team of researchers and engineers.

The role emphasizes publishing results and shaping the strategic NLP roadmap. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate breakthroughs into practical features, while staying aligned with industry trends and academic leadership.