Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer

Who we are

Samsara (NYSE: IOT) is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, a platform that enables organizations that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations. At Samsara, we are helping improve the safety, efficiency and sustainability of the physical operations that power our global economy, including agriculture, construction, field services, transportation, and manufacturing.

Working at Samsara means you'll help define the future of physical operations and be on a team that's shaping an exciting array of product solutions, including Video-Based Safety, Vehicle Telematics, Apps and Driver Workflows, and Equipment Monitoring. As part of a recently public company, you'll have the autonomy and support to make an impact as we build for the long term.

About this role:

Samsara's cloud-connected sensor platform collects observations about the world in near real-time. Samsara builds an extensive set of products, including battery-powered, wireless sensors, Linux-based IoT gateways, and Internet-connected dashcams. As a Senior Embedded Software Engineer at Samsara, you will develop software that runs on millions of devices, deployed by our industrial and enterprise customers. You'll tackle challenges including evaluating and selecting hardware components, bringing up new hardware platforms and sensors, building systems to gather data and detect meaningful events, and structuring recorded data to allow efficient analysis across thousands of devices.

We use C for our MCU-based platforms, Golang for embedded applications on Linux-based gateways and backend services, Google protocol buffers to structure data, and various AWS technologies to process and store data. Experience with these exact technologies is not required.

You should apply if:

• You want to impact the industries that run our world: Your efforts will result in real-world impact, helping to keep the lights on, get food into grocery stores, reduce emissions, and ensure workers return home safely.
• You are the architect of your own career: If you put in the work, this role won't be your last at Samsara. We have built a culture that encourages rapid career development and countless opportunities to experiment and master your craft in a hyper growth environment.
• You're energized by our opportunity: The vision we have to digitize large sectors of the global economy requires your full focus and best efforts to bring forth creative, ambitious ideas for our customers.
• You want to be with the best: At Samsara, we win together, celebrate together and support each other. You will be surrounded by a high-caliber team that will encourage you to do your best.

In this role, you will:

• Shape the hardware, not just the code that runs on it. Sit in reviews with our electrical engineers and argue for the right SoC, amount of flash/RAM, and combination of sensors, then prove those choices out on prototypes that reach real customers in months, not years.
• Be the first person to make a new board do anything at all. Bring up new platforms and prototypes from virgin silicon: configure I/O, get SPI, I2C, UART, BLE talking, debug system init, validate the design, and turn unproven hardware into a product.
• Own the layers everything else depends on. Peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, device firmware updates, as well as the core management layers like power and connectivity.
• Chase every microamp. Design protocols and hardware management for battery-powered sensors and gateways where the gap between good firmware and great firmware is measured in years of device life.
• Work with the people who ship the whole product. Partner with product, full-stack, mobile and quality engineers so the data your firmware produces arrives intact and useful.
• Raise the bar for the engineers around you. At the Senior level, you are a force multiplier for your team through thoughtful designs, rigorous reviews, hands-on mentorship, and sound technical judgment.

What you bring

• 8+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems, where memory, processing power, energy and timing are all scarce.
• You have led firmware development for several new products end to end, from initial concept through architecture, technical implementation, validation, and product launch.
• Substantial bare-metal and RTOS experience - Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent. Mutexes and semaphores are everyday tools for you.
• You have brought up new boards. First power-on of unproven hardware, working out whether the bug is in your code, a library, the schematic, or the part itself.
• Fluency in the low-level interfaces - SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, ADC and the ability to debug the seam between hardware and software.
• Real bench instincts. The usage of an oscilloscope, network analyzer, or RF spectrum analyzer is how you form a hypothesis.
• Senior-level scope. You have led work spanning hardware, firmware, cloud and quality from concept to shipped product, and consistently driven consensus across teams.
• Cross-layer judgment. You can trace how a decision at the driver level surfaces in a customer's experience three layers up.
• Fluency in C. You know what the compiler is doing and can read a linker map, a stack trace, or a corrupted heap without guessing.
• You write things down. Design docs, review comments and post-mortems that other engineers can actually act on.
• You ship fast without shipping badly. Comfortable iterating on customer feedback at speed, backed by automated testing.
• You use AI smartly. It's part of your everyday workflow and multiplies your output without watering things down.

What will set you apart

• BLE at depth - You understand what's going on down the PHY and can build orchestration for the system to use in a performant and power efficient way.
• Cellular IoT - LTE-M or NB-IoT modem integration, power state management, and the certification gauntlet (FCC, PTCRB, carrier approval).
• Securing embedded systems end to end - secure boot, firmware signing, cryptography, and key management that survives contact with manufacturing.
• OTA and device firmware update at fleet scale - A/B partitions, rollback, and the discipline of never bricking a device you cannot physically reach.
• You've been on the factory floor - You understand the processes behind mass production and quality assurance of electronics, and have a track record of fixing production show stoppers.

Benefits

Our target total compensation market position is in the top 25% of all software and hardware companies. Employees receive an above market-rate salary, an outstanding equity offering, employee-led remote and flexible working, team based incentive schemes, health benefits, personal development, and more.

Annual Base Salary

The range of annual base salary for this position is $162,400 to $290,000 USD. Base pay offered may vary depending on factors including city of residence, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role is also eligible for an initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff, and ongoing refresh opportunities.

Accommodations

Samsara is an inclusive work environment, and we are committed to ensuring equal opportunity in employment for qualified persons with disabilities. Please email [email protected] if you require any reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process.