Senior NLP Architect & AI Systems Lead — Durban

Placements24; Durban; Hybrid; ZAR 1,800,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Executive compensation potential

Healthcare coverage

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Principal AI Architect specializing in NLP to lead architectural strategy and execution for advanced NLP projects in Durban. The role demands deep NLP research experience and a proven ability to architect scalable AI systems.

You will mentor engineers, drive cutting‑edge model development (Transformers, BERT, GPT), and collaborate with product teams to deliver high‑impact solutions while championing responsible deployment of NLP technologies.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in NLP or related field.
• 10+ years of AI/ML experience with a focus on NLP.
• Experience architecting large‑scale NLP systems.
• Proficiency with PyTorch, TensorFlow and NLP libraries (Transformers, spaCy, NLTK).
• Strong understanding of linguistic theories and statistical NLP methods.
• Experience with cloud AI platforms (AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform).
• Excellent problem solving, leadership and communication skills.
• Residency or strong ties to Durban preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architectural strategy for NLP initiatives across the organization.
• Design, develop, and evaluate cutting‑edge NLP models and systems (Transformers, BERT, GPT).
• Lead development of text classification, sentiment analysis, translation, QA, and summarization solutions.
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to translate requirements into robust architectures.
• Ensure scalability, reliability, and performance of NLP systems in production.
• Evaluate and select NLP tools and technologies; mentor junior engineers and researchers.
• Stay updated with NLP research and industry trends; contribute to IP through research and publications.

Skills

NLP leadership

AI/ML architecture

Stakeholder influence

Mentoring

Publication track record

Education

PhD in CS/AI/NLP

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face Transformers

spaCy

NLTK

AWS SageMaker

Google AI Platform

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Principal AI Architect specializing in NLP to lead architectural strategy and execution for advanced NLP projects in Durban. The role demands deep NLP research experience and a proven ability to architect scalable AI systems.

You will mentor engineers, drive cutting‑edge model development (Transformers, BERT, GPT), and collaborate with product teams to deliver high‑impact solutions while championing responsible deployment of NLP technologies.