Senior Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer

Placements24; Mtubatuba Local Municipality; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Fully remote work

Health & wellness benefits

Professional development budget

Stock options

Global team events

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Senior NLP Engineer to join a fully remote team developing AI-driven language tools. You will design, build, and deploy NLP models to understand, interpret, and generate human language, impacting products that enhance user interaction.

You will work with data scientists and engineers, explore Transformers (BERT, GPT), optimize for performance, mentor junior engineers, document experiments, and stay abreast of NLP research.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, AI, or related field.
• Proven experience in developing and deploying NLP models in production.
• Deep understanding of NLP concepts, algorithms and techniques.
• Expertise in Python and NLP libraries (NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Strong experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and their applications.
• Excellent remote collaboration and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement state-of-the-art NLP models for text classification, sentiment analysis, NER, translation, and text generation.
• Design and build robust NLP pipelines for preprocessing, feature extraction, and evaluation.
• Collaborate with data scientists and software engineers to integrate NLP into production systems.
• Explore latest NLP techniques including Transformers (BERT, GPT) and RNNs.
• Optimize NLP models for performance, scalability, and efficiency.
• Contribute to development of language understanding and generation capabilities.
• Stay current with research and industry trends in NLP and AI.
• Mentor junior engineers and document methodologies and experiments.

Skills

NLP expertise

Python

Deep learning

Transformers

LLMs

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI/NLP

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Transformers (HuggingFace)

Job description

About the Role

Our client is at the forefront of developing innovative AI-driven communication tools and is actively seeking a Senior Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer to join their fully remote team. This role offers the ultimate flexibility, allowing you to work from anywhere as part of a globally distributed, high-performing unit. You will be responsible for designing, building, and deploying advanced NLP models and systems that understand, interpret, and generate human language. Your work will directly contribute to products that enhance user interaction and streamline complex language-based tasks. This is a remote-first opportunity for an experienced NLP specialist who thrives on challenging problems and wants to make a significant impact in the field of artificial intelligence. We foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning, supported by cutting-edge tools and technologies accessible to all our remote employees. Join us to shape the future of language AI from the comfort of your own home office.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and implement state-of-the-art NLP models for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, machine translation, and text generation.
• Design and build robust NLP pipelines for data preprocessing, feature extraction, and model evaluation.
• Collaborate with data scientists and software engineers to integrate NLP capabilities into production systems.
• Research and experiment with the latest NLP techniques, including deep learning models like Transformers (BERT, GPT) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs).
• Optimize NLP models for performance, scalability, and efficiency.
• Contribute to the development of language understanding and generation capabilities.
• Stay current with academic research and industry trends in NLP and AI.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to the team's technical growth.
• Document methodologies, experiments, and model implementations.

Requirements

• Master's or PhD degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Proven experience in developing and deploying NLP models and systems in production.
• Deep understanding of NLP concepts, algorithms and techniques.
• Expertise in programming languages like Python and proficiency with NLP libraries (e.g., NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Strong experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and their applications.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work effectively in a remote, collaborative environment.
• Strong communication and teamwork abilities.
• Must be comfortable and productive in a fully remote work setting.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and bonus structure.
• Fully remote work arrangement with flexible hours.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
• Generous professional development budget for courses, conferences, and training.
• Stock options and long-term incentive plans.
• Opportunity to work on impactful, cutting‑edge AI projects.
• Support for home office setup and continuous learning.
• Annual virtual team events and global collaboration.