Senior NLP Engineer - Remote AI Innovator

Placements24; Soweto; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health and wellness benefits

Professional development budget

Remote work flexibility

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer focused on NLP to join a fully remote team serving clients across South Africa. You will design, build, and deploy advanced NLP models, collaborating with engineers and data scientists to drive AI-powered products.

The role requires 5+ years in ML with NLP, strong Python and DL framework skills (PyTorch/TensorFlow), and familiarity with transformer architectures. Remote work within SA offers flexible collaboration and impactful projects.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS/AI/Computational Linguistics or related field.
• At least 5 years of professional ML engineering experience with NLP focus.
• Proven production NLP model development and deployment experience.
• Strong Python and ML libraries (scikit-learn, NLTK, SpaCy).
• Hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable NLP models and pipelines.
• Implement and fine-tune state-of-the-art NLP algorithms.
• Process and analyze large text datasets for quality and relevance.
• Collaborate with product and software teams to deploy NLP features.
• Conduct experiments, analyze results, and iterate models for accuracy.
• Stay updated with NLP research and ML advancements.
• Develop data ingestion and preprocessing workflows for text data.
• Optimize ML models for performance and scalability.
• Contribute to code reviews, docs, and knowledge sharing.
• Mentor junior ML engineers and data scientists.

Skills

Analytical thinking

Problem solving

Independent work

Education

MSc/ PhD in CS/AI/Computational Linguistics

Tools

Python

scikit-learn

NLTK

SpaCy

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Transformer models (BERT/GPT)

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer focused on NLP to join a fully remote team serving clients across South Africa. You will design, build, and deploy advanced NLP models, collaborating with engineers and data scientists to drive AI-powered products.

The role requires 5+ years in ML with NLP, strong Python and DL framework skills (PyTorch/TensorFlow), and familiarity with transformer architectures. Remote work within SA offers flexible collaboration and impactful projects.