Senior NLP Architect & AI Engineering Lead

Placements24; Pietermaritzburg; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Annual performance bonuses

Stock options

Job summary

Placements24 in Pietermaritzburg seeks a Lead AI Engineer with NLP expertise to drive the development and deployment of cutting-edge NLP solutions. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers, guiding projects from ideation to production within an innovative technology hub.

The role requires a Master’s or PhD in CS/AI and 5+ years in AI/ML with a strong NLP focus, plus hands-on Python, spaCy, transformers, and cloud/MLOps experience.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, AI or related field required.
• Minimum 5 years of professional AI/ML experience with a strong NLP focus.
• Proven leadership of technical teams and complex projects.
• Deep knowledge of NLP techniques and libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Transformers).
• Proficiency in Python and data science libraries (Pandas, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong software development practices including testing, CI/CD, and Git.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor AI engineers and data scientists focused on NLP.
• Architect and implement scalable NLP systems and ML pipelines.
• Develop models for text classification, sentiment analysis, NER, translation, QA.
• Oversee data acquisition, cleaning, and preprocessing for NLP training.
• Ensure robustness and accuracy of deployed NLP models.
• Define NLP roadmaps with product and engineering teams.
• Conduct code reviews and enforce MLOps best practices.
• Evaluate and integrate third-party NLP tools and libraries.
• Present progress and findings to stakeholders and leadership.

Skills

Team leadership

NLP expertise

Python

CI/CD

Git

Analytical thinking

Communication

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/AI

Tools

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Scikit-learn

Pandas

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Placements24 in Pietermaritzburg seeks a Lead AI Engineer with NLP expertise to drive the development and deployment of cutting-edge NLP solutions. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers, guiding projects from ideation to production within an innovative technology hub.

The role requires a Master’s or PhD in CS/AI and 5+ years in AI/ML with a strong NLP focus, plus hands-on Python, spaCy, transformers, and cloud/MLOps experience.