Staff Application Security Engineer

About the role:

Samsara sits at the center of hardware, software, AI, and the physical world, processing 25+ trillion data points annually across thousands of connected devices. The Samsara Application Security team protects this vast footprint end-to-end, spanning cloud services, internal systems, and firmware running on IoT hardware in the field.

As a Staff Application Security Engineer, you’ll drive the overarching technical direction for our application security and vulnerability management programs. This is a high-visibility role where you'll influence a broad surface area while retaining the flexibility to dive deep into critical domain focus areas as security priorities evolve.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the ongoing strategy, operation, and continuous improvement of Samsara's vulnerability management program, along with other core application security programs — not just execute against an existing process, but define what the process should be.
• Own and drive down mean time to remediate (MTTR) across the vulnerability backlog, as SLAs tighten.
• Build and champion automation and tooling that scale vulnerability detection and response across cloud, firmware/IoT, and corporate systems, rather than relying on manual, one-by-one review.
• Set technical and architectural direction for the program, translating leadership's strategic priorities into a concrete execution plan for the team.
• Drive remediation by building trust with engineering teams and providing clear, actionable guidance — partnering with technical program management on reporting rather than owning it directly.
• Mentor and level up other engineers on secure design and remediation practices, and be a technical voice other teams look to when priorities are unclear.
• Communicate risk and remediation tradeoffs to engineering leadership in terms they can act on, without owning the relationship end to end.
• Participate in security incident investigations involving high-profile vulnerabilities, assessing potential impact on Samsara's infrastructure.
• Be regularly on call to support critical vulnerability response.
• Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles (Focus on Customer Success, Build for the Long Term, Adopt a Growth Mindset, Be Inclusive, Win as a Team) as we scale globally and across new offices

Minimum requirements for the role:

• 10+ years of relevant experience as a cloud engineer or security engineer, including hands-on vulnerability management across a broad, multi-product enterprise environment — not a single product or team's slice of it.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, and JavaScript.
• Demonstrated ability to independently set technical and architectural direction for a security program, and to drive remediation across a broad, multi-surface environment without direct authority over the teams doing the fixing.
• Significant experience with modern vulnerability management tooling (e.g., Wiz, Semgrep) and deep familiarity with vulnerability scoring frameworks such as CVSS and EPSS.
• Strong AWS cloud services background.
• Deep understanding of Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and Software Composition Analysis (SCA).
• Hands-on use of AI/LLM tooling in your own security workflow — triage, detection logic, remediation drafting — plus credibility speaking to how AI is changing the threat landscape and the tooling available to address it.

An ideal candidate also has:

• Experience with C/C++, relevant to firmware and embedded systems.
• Background at a cloud-native, AI-forward company actively building agentic or AI-driven products.
• Experience with security automation platforms (e.g., Tines) and serverless frameworks (e.g., AWS Lambda).
• Experience integrating vulnerability management into modern CI/CD pipelines with a "shift-left" mentality.
• Experience spanning SaaS, firmware, and corporate IT security programs — not just one product line.
• Experience managing vulnerabilities within a FedRAMP-certified environment.
• Experience building, extending, or wiring up AI copilots/agents for security workflows (e.g., automated triage, remediation drafting).