Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer at Samsara in Remote - SF Bay Area

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. These devices are the building blocks Samsara uses to construct enterprise solutions for a wide range of verticals, including commercial fleet management and industrial monitoring. Through a unique integration of sensor data such as GPS, acceleration, temperature, video, and more, we enable our customers to gain greater insights into operations, identify and eliminate inefficiencies, and react to alerts all in near real-time.

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 while providing deep insights into individual events.

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 most importantly, 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 set up our employees for success and have built a culture that encourages rapid career development, 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.

Click here to learn more about Samsara's cultural philosophy.

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, that determine whether a device in the field quietly recovers on its own or becomes an RMA.
• 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 as it lands in the hands of dispatchers, fleet managers, and technicians who depend on it every shift.
• 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, you help other engineers deliver better work. You lead by example, strengthen engineering practices, and connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes. You bring clarity to ambiguous problems, act with intellectual honesty and urgency, and deliver high-quality solutions iteratively.

What you bring

• 8+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems, You have delivered reliable firmware where memory, processing power, energy and timing are all scarce, and you know how to measure, optimize and make deliberate trade-offs between them.
• You have led firmware development for several new products end to end. You have taken firmware from initial concept through architecture, technical implementation, validation, and product launch, providing hands-on technical leadership throughout.
• Substantial bare-metal and RTOS experience - Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent. You have made scheduling, memory and timing decisions. Mutexes and semaphores are everyday tools for you.
• You have brought up new boards. First power-on of unproven hardware, at the bench with the electrical engineer who drew it up, 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, not what you reach for after the print statements run out.
• Senior-level scope. You have led work spanning hardware, firmware, cloud and quality from concept to shipped product. You have 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, and you make that trade-off on purpose.

• Fluency in C. You know what the compiler is doing, and you 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 and code you would be content to inherit.
• You use AI smartly. It’s part of your every day work flow 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 have an understanding of the processes behind the mass production and quality assurance of electronics. You have a track record of fixing production show stoppers.

Automatically included at the end of external job posts:

At Samsara, we welcome all. All sizes, colors, cultures, sexes, beliefs, religions, ages, people. We depend on the unique approaches of our team members to help us solve complex problems. We are committed to increasing diversity across our team and ensuring that Samsara is a place where people from all backgrounds can make an impact.

Benefits

Our target total compensation market position is in the top 25% of all software and hardware companies. Our 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, Samsara for Good fund, and much, much more. Take a look at our Total Rewards site to learn more.

Accommodations

Samsara is an inclusive work environment, and we are committed to ensuring equal opportunity in employment for qualified persons with disabilities. Please email