Data Scientist

About Powerfleet Powerfleet (Nasdaq: AIOT; JSE: PWR) is a global leader in the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) software-as-a-service (SaaS) mobile asset industry. With more than 30 years of experience, Powerfleet unifies business operations through the ingestion, harmonization, and integration of data—regardless of source—and delivers actionable insights to help companies meet their strategic objectives around Safety, Compliance, Efficiency and Sustainability. Our people-first culture and relentless innovation empower customers to achieve measurable, sustainable business improvements. Powerfleet serves over 2.6 million subscribers across more than 48,000 customers in 120 countries, with commercial operations across every major continent. Job Overview Powerfleet is looking for a Data Scientist to join our AI Team and help build tools that enable customers to answer technical questions, troubleshoot issues, and understand their fleet and asset data. This is a hands-on role for someone who is highly independent and ownership-driven: you’ll define problems, drive execution, and deliver production-grade GenAI capabilities end-to-end. You combine strong software engineering with practical GenAI experience, rigorous evaluation habits, and a bias for shipping improvements that customers feel. Location: Full-time, fully remote. This role is especially well-suited for candidates based in South Africa, with a team culture that supports async collaboration and healthy time-zone overlap.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship Generative AI capabilities that power tools for technical Q&A and data understanding.
• Develop agentic workflows (planning, tool use, retrieval, execution, verification) with measurable quality, reliability, and cost controls.
• Build evaluation systems for GenAI: offline test sets, automated scoring, human review loops, regression suites, and production monitoring.
• Deliver production-ready services and pipelines (APIs, background jobs, data processing, configuration, release workflows) with strong engineering discipline.
• Partner with product, engineering, and domain experts to translate customer problems into milestones, acceptance criteria, and clear success metrics.
• Improve system quality through testing, observability, performance optimization (latency and scalability), and guardrails.
• Contribute to an engineering-first culture: thoughtful design docs, code reviews, and pragmatic technical decisions.

Qualifications

• 6–10+ years of relevant experience in applied data science and Generative AI/LLM product development, including significant responsibility for production delivery.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with modern engineering practices (testing, packaging, CI/CD, APIs, code reviews).
• Proven experience delivering GenAI/LLM applications into production (not just prototypes), including reliability and operational considerations.
• Hands-on experience building agents and using agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, Agno, or similar tool-using agent stacks).
• Delivery-oriented and comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end: scoping, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Independent, autonomous, self-driven, and proactive in a remote team; able to take a problem area and drive it to outcomes with minimal oversight.
• Clear communicator: able to explain trade-offs, write crisp documentation, and align stakeholders.
• Deeply curious and committed to staying up to date with the latest developments in Generative AI and agent frameworks, recognizing the field evolves rapidly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with fleet management, telematics, IoT, time-series data, or analytics platforms.
• Experience deploying LLM/GenAI services in cloud environments (Azure/AWS/GCP), including monitoring and cost management.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance considerations for enterprise AI products.
• Experience building structured LLM evaluations (golden sets, adversarial testing, prompt/agent regression).
• Exposure to multi-region or multi-language product needs.

Benefits

• Fully remote role with a remote-first team culture (well-suited to Europe and South Africa time zones).
• High-ownership work on a customer-facing AI product that solves real operational and technical problems.
• Environment that values shipping, measurable impact, and maintainable systems.
• Competitive, region-aligned compensation and meaningful opportunities to grow scope based on impact.

Powerfleet is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workplace that reflects the rich diversity of South Africa. We are committed to the principles of the Employment Equity Act and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) and actively seek to empower suitably qualified candidates from designated groups. We believe that inclusion and diversity are key to innovation, growth, and shared success. Apply tot his job Apply To this Job