To become a natural language processing engineer, you need a comprehensive set of skills, including technical, analytical, and communication capabilities. You should also have a strong background in data engineering, computer science, linguistics, and mathematics. Specifically, proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, or C++ is essential. Additionally, knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles and practices is required. Experience with NLP techniques and methods like tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, word embeddings, neural networks, and deep learning is also necessary. Furthermore, familiarity with NLP frameworks and libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, spaCy, NLTK and Gensim is important. Moreover, the ability to work with text and speech data from different domains, languages and dialects is essential. Understanding of data engineering concepts and tools such as data pipelines, data quality, data governance, data storage, data processing and data visualization is also beneficial. Finally experience with cloud platforms and services like AWS Azure and Google Cloud as well as communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders are necessary. Curiosity and creativity to explore new NLP problems and solutions are also key qualities for an NLP engineer.