Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer Job Description Template

The natural language processing engineer builds systems that work with text, from classification and extraction through to retrieval and generation. The field has changed substantially with large language models, so the role now spans both traditional approaches, which remain more appropriate for many problems, and modern model based methods. Knowing which to use is a meaningful part of the job.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Build models and pipelines for text classification, extraction and retrieval
• Design preprocessing and tokenisation appropriate to the task and language
• Fine tune or prompt language models where that is the right approach
• Build retrieval systems including embedding and vector search
• Design evaluation appropriate to language tasks, which is often difficult
• Handle multilingual requirements where relevant
• Optimize inference cost and latency for text workloads
• Investigate failure cases and improve robustness
• Work with domain experts on annotation and label quality
• Document model behavior and known weaknesses

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, computational linguistics or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years building natural language processing systems
• Strong Python and experience with transformer based models
• Understanding of both classical and neural approaches to text
• Experience with embeddings and retrieval systems
• Skill at designing evaluation for tasks without clean ground truth
• Awareness of the cost and latency implications of large models
• Experience with annotation quality and inter annotator agreement
• Good engineering practice

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with retrieval augmented generation
• Multilingual or low resource language experience