NLP Engineer - Barcelona (Work & Study Programme)

Harbour.Space Institute of Technology offers a unique work-study opportunity through its NLP Engineer Apprenticeship combined with a Master of Data and Computer Science programme . This programme provides project-based academic learning alongside an industry apprenticeship as an NLP Engineer, with full tuition covered through a scholarship.

We're looking for a mid-level NLP Engineer to join one of our Barcelona-based partner companies through Harbour.Space's Work & Study Programme, a structured track for engineers who want to complete an apprenticeship in Spain while completing a fully-funded Master's in Data and Computer Science.

What you'll be doing:

You'll design, develop and optimise NLP models and pipelines that ship to real users. Day to day, you'll work with large language models (fine-tuning, prompt engineering and evaluation) and build pipelines for text classification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and information extraction. You'll work closely with data scientists, ML engineers and product teams to take NLP solutions into production.

Who we're looking for:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science or a related field
• 2+ years of hands-on experience in NLP or ML engineering
• Strong Python skills and experience with NLP libraries (Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, NLTK, LangChain)
• Solid understanding of machine learning and deep learning fundamentals
• Experience working with LLMs and transformer-based models
• Good knowledge of data preprocessing, feature engineering and model evaluation for text data
• Comfortable collaborating in cross-functional teams
• Fluent English

What your responsibilities might include:

• Fine-tuning and evaluating LLMs for specific product use cases
• Building and maintaining end-to-end NLP pipelines, from raw text ingestion to model serving
• Improving model accuracy and latency using real user data and production feedback loops
• Analysing large text datasets and turning findings into product or technical decisions
• Integrating NLP features into the core product alongside engineering and product teams
• Explaining technical results clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

What you get:

• Full Master’s in Data Science or Computer Science covered by scholarship
• Monthly stipend while you work and study
• Cohort of international mid-level professionals going through the same track