Lead Data Scientist - NLP Specialist

About the Role

Our client is seeking an accomplished Lead Data Scientist with a deep specialization in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to spearhead their advanced analytics initiatives in Cape Town . In this leadership position, you will guide a team of talented data scientists in developing sophisticated NLP models to unlock insights from textual data, enhance customer understanding, and drive product innovation. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the strategic direction of data science within the organization and make a tangible impact on key business outcomes through data-driven decision‑making. You will foster a culture of scientific rigor and collaboration, working on complex, impactful projects.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced NLP models for tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and machine translation.
• Mentor and guide a team of data scientists, providing technical leadership and fostering their professional growth.
• Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to identify opportunities for leveraging NLP to solve business problems and create value.
• Develop and maintain robust data pipelines for processing and analyzing large volumes of unstructured text data.
• Conduct in-depth exploratory data analysis and communicate complex findings clearly and concisely to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Stay current with the latest research and advancements in NLP and machine learning , applying them to improve existing solutions and develop new capabilities.

Requirements

• Master's or Ph.D. in Data Science, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in data science , with at least 4 years focused on NLP .
• Proven experience leading data science teams and projects.
• Expertise in Python and common NLP libraries (e.g., NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Strong understanding of statistical modeling, machine learning algorithms, and deep learning architectures for text data.
• Experience with big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Hadoop) and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and executive bonuses.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• Generous annual leave and personal development allowance.
• Opportunities to present research at industry conferences.
• An inspiring and innovative work environment in the vibrant city of Cape Town .