Senior 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, harmonisation, 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.

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:

• 4–8+ 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:

• 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.

If you’re excited by building reliable, production-grade AI assistants—and you bring strong engineering plus applied GenAI expertise—we’d love to hear from you.

Location Requirement: Candidates applying for this position must currently be based in South Africa and have the legal right to work in South Africa.

EEO/ BEE Statement

Powerfleet is an equal opportunity employer committed to employment equity, diversity, and inclusion. In alignment with the Employment Equity Act 1998 and our Employment Equity plan, we actively encourage applications from designated groups, including Black people, women, and individuals with disabilities.

As part of our commitment to transformation and in accordance with the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, preference may be given to candidates from designated groups where appropriate. All qualified applicants will be considered based on merit, skills, and experience.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodation throughout the recruitment process. If you require support or adjustments, please let us know.