Senior NLP Lead Engineer - ML & Transformers (Cape Town)

Placements24; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Competitive salary

Professional development

Conferences sponsorship

Advanced technology access

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead ML Engineer (NLP) in Cape Town to drive advanced NLP projects. You will lead a team of ML engineers and NLP specialists, guiding model development from concept to deployment and optimization.

The role requires a PhD/Master's in CS/AI with 6+ years of NLP experience, proficiency in Python and TF/PyTorch, and strong leadership to mentor engineers across product teams. Cape Town-based with relocation support offered.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in CS/AI or a closely related field.
• 6+ years in ML engineering with a strong NLP focus.
• Extensive experience with NLP libraries and frameworks such as spaCy, NLTK, transformers, and Gensim.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills with a track record of team growth.
• Excellent collaboration across product, design, and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and deployment of advanced NLP models and systems.
• Mentor and guide engineers and NLP specialists.
• Oversee data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation.
• Build robust NLP pipelines for sentiment, classification, NER, QA, and summarization.
• Collaborate with product managers to integrate NLP features.
• Research state-of-the-art NLP techniques and assess applicability.
• Ensure scalability and reliability of NLP solutions.

Skills

NLP leadership

Machine learning

Python

Deep learning (TF/PyTorch)

NLP libraries (spaCy, NLTK, HF-TRANS,G

Cloud ML platforms (AWS SageMaker, GCP

Mentoring / team management

Education

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

Tools

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

Gensim

TensorFlow

PyTorch

AWS SageMaker

Google AI Platform

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead ML Engineer (NLP) in Cape Town to drive advanced NLP projects. You will lead a team of ML engineers and NLP specialists, guiding model development from concept to deployment and optimization.

The role requires a PhD/Master's in CS/AI with 6+ years of NLP experience, proficiency in Python and TF/PyTorch, and strong leadership to mentor engineers across product teams. Cape Town-based with relocation support offered.