Senior NLP Engineer - Dialogue Systems (Hybrid, Pretoria)

Placements24; Gauteng; Hybrid; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental & vision insurance

Paid time off (vacation, sick leave, +

Job summary

Placements24 invites applications for an Senior NLP Engineer specializing in dialogue systems in Pretoria, Gauteng. Join a hybrid team focused on advancing conversational AI across platforms.

You will design, deploy, and refine NLP models, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and mentor juniors while ensuring scalable production-ready solutions in the AI & Emerging Technologies division.

Qualifications

• Must hold a Master’s or PhD in CS, Computational Linguistics, AI, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize state-of-the-art NLP models for intent recognition, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, and dialogue state tracking.
• Develop and deploy robust dialogue management systems for chatbots and virtual assistants.
• Fine-tune large language models for dialogue generation and understanding.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers to define requirements.
• Test and evaluate NLP models to ensure performance, accuracy, and scalability.
• Analyze user interaction data to identify improvements and guide iterative development.
• Stay updated with NLP research and advances in conversational AI.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical growth.
• Ensure production-ready, scalable systems in Pretoria, Gauteng.

Education

Master's or PhD in CS / Computational Linguistics / AI

4+ years of NLP experience with dialogue systems

Strong Python proficiency

Deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow)

NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Hugging Face Transformers)

Machine learning & deep learning concepts for NLP

Data annotation, corpus creation & evaluation

Excellent problem-solving & collaboration

Tools

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

Job description

Placements24 invites applications for an Senior NLP Engineer specializing in dialogue systems in Pretoria, Gauteng. Join a hybrid team focused on advancing conversational AI across platforms.

You will design, deploy, and refine NLP models, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and mentor juniors while ensuring scalable production-ready solutions in the AI & Emerging Technologies division.