NLP Lead

TBC Bank Uzbekistan, the first digital bank in Uzbekistan and a part of TBC Bank Group PLC, commenced its operations in 2020. Today, the bank is rapidly developing, offering retail banking solutions through its innovative fintech platform. Over 4 million registered users have access to banking services via its mobile application. "Making People's Life Easier" - the core principle of TBC Bank's operations. By advancing digital technologies across all spheres of life, TBC Bank is dedicated to building a bank free from queues, physical offices, bureaucracy, complex terminologies, and lengthy waits.

We are looking for talented individuals with NLP Lead experience to join our team

Primary Focus: 

• Lead the design and development of LLM-powered conversational agents and dialogue systems.
• Own the full NLP/LLM lifecycle: research, prototyping, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment at scale.
• Manage and mentor a small team of ML/NLP engineers, ensuring high-quality delivery and innovation.
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and personalization.
• Optimize LLMs for production: inference latency, cost efficiency, safety, and quality.
• Stay on top of the latest LLM research and translate it into practical product features.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and business stakeholders to align AI capabilities with user needs.  

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in NLP/ML, with at least 1+ years of hands-on LLM experience (fine-tuning, prompt engineering, evaluation, deployment).
• Proven track record of shipping LLM-based systems into production (APIs, pipelines, scalable services).
• Expertise in PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, and modern LLM tooling (LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.).
• Deep understanding of semantic search, embeddings, and knowledge-grounded dialogue.
• Leadership experience: managing engineers, defining roadmaps, and scaling NLP/LLM initiatives.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to balance research innovation with product delivery.
• English proficiency sufficient for technical discussions, reading papers, and vendor/partner communication.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with model distillation, quantization, and optimization for production.
• Work with evaluation frameworks for hallucination detection, bias, and safety in LLMs.
• Contributions to open-source LLM/NLP projects or published research.
• Knowledge of multi-modal models and integrations (vision, structured data, etc.).

Working with us means:

• An open atmosphere and vibrant team life without unnecessary bureaucracy or dress code;
• Medical insurance with extended coverage after the probation period;
• Coverage for conference participation, discounts for English language courses, and access to educational platforms (Coursera, Udemy);
• Internal meetups: lightning & thunder talks;
• High-performance equipment and additional monitors for productive work;
• Class “A” office in the city center
• A multicultural team (Georgia, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Tajikistan);
• Referral program "Bring a Friend" with bonus opportunities;
• Coffee points for snacks at any time;
• Team-building and sports events that foster team spirit.