Senior NLP Lead Engineer — Relocation & Growth

Placements24; George; On-site; ZAR 1,800,000 - 3,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance to George

Medical & dental coverage

Annual leave

Professional development & conferences

Access to advanced computing infra

Employer matched retirement

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to guide the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP solutions in George, Western Cape. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers, shaping product features and AI strategy in a fast-paced environment.

The role requires deep NLP knowledge, strong Python expertise, and proven leadership to deliver scalable ML systems and robust MLOps pipelines.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, AI, Computational Linguistics or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in machine learning engineering with a focus on NLP.
• Proven experience leading and managing technical teams.
• Deep expertise in NLP techniques, algorithms and libraries (spaCy, NLTK, Hugging Face).
• Strong programming skills in Python and ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Experience with MLOps tools and best practices (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD).
• Excellent understanding of data structures, algorithms and software design.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art NLP models.
• Mentor a team of ML engineers and data scientists.
• Oversee data collection, preprocessing, model training, evaluation and deployment.
• Collaborate with product and software teams to define requirements and deliver AI features.
• Evaluate and integrate new NLP technologies and research findings.
• Develop and maintain robust MLOps pipelines for CI/CD and monitoring.
• Ensure scalability, reliability and efficiency of ML systems.
• Contribute to the company's AI strategy and roadmap.

Skills

Leadership

NLP expertise

Python

ML lifecycle

MLOps

Team management

Communication

Education

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

Tools

spaCy

NLTK

Hugging Face Transformers

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Machine Learning Engineer (NLP) to guide the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP solutions in George, Western Cape. You will lead a team of engineers and researchers, shaping product features and AI strategy in a fast-paced environment.

The role requires deep NLP knowledge, strong Python expertise, and proven leadership to deliver scalable ML systems and robust MLOps pipelines.