About the position
As the Senior People Partner for R&D, you’ll be more than a traditional HR Business Partner—you’ll be a strategic force behind how we design and scale high-performing, fast-moving teams across our Product, Platform, and AI engineering organizations. This role is about driving innovation through org design, fostering an elite engineering and product culture, and enabling teams to move fast without breaking execution discipline. This is the most senior individual contributor People Partner role supporting North America R&D, with a clear path to leading the entire R&D People Partner function. You will be the successor to the R&D People Partner leadership role, making this a rare opportunity to shape not just the teams, but also the future of the function itself. You’ll partner closely with engineering and product leaders to design organizations that prioritize small, autonomous, high-impact teams, balancing agility with operational excellence. Whether it’s helping AI and platform teams iterate at startup speed or ensuring that our most mature products continue to scale, you will be the architect behind how we structure, grow, and enable world-class talent to push boundaries.
Responsibilities
- Architect small, high-performing teams that can move fast and iterate quickly while maintaining operational excellence.
- Help leaders design orgs that scale without bureaucracy, ensuring the company remains as agile as a startup even as we grow.
- Identify bottlenecks, silos, and inefficiencies, restructuring teams proactively to maximize velocity and impact.
- Act as the most senior individual contributor in the North America R&D People Partner function, reporting directly to senior leadership with a path to owning the R&D People Partner org.
- Work alongside senior engineering, AI, and platform leaders to anticipate talent needs and build an org structure that enables sustained innovation.
- Be a key voice in shaping the talent strategy for next-gen AI, platform, and product engineering teams.
- Ensure teams maintain an innovation mindset while reinforcing best practices for execution, delivery, and accountability.
- Implement scalable leadership development programs, ensuring that Samsara continues to produce world-class product and engineering leaders from within.
- Work with senior leaders to drive a culture of continuous feedback and radical candor, enabling top talent to reach their full potential.
- Leverage people analytics to inform org design, team health, and leadership effectiveness.
- Provide insights that help leaders make proactive decisions on hiring, retention, and performance before challenges emerge.
- Drive continuous improvement by measuring how team structure impacts speed, execution, and innovation cycles.
- Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles as we scale globally and across new offices.
Requirements
- 8+ years of People Partner experience, with at least 5 years supporting R&D, product, AI, or engineering teams in high-growth, fast-paced environments.
- Proven Experience Driving Fast-Paced Innovation: You’ve designed org structures that enable teams to ship quickly while maintaining execution discipline.
- Influence & Communication: You are a trusted advisor to executives and know how to navigate complex org dynamics while driving decisive action.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: You can translate people metrics into strategic insights that directly impact speed, execution, and long-term team success.
- Ownership Mentality: You operate with a founder mindset, embracing ambiguity and solving problems proactively.
Benefits
- Competitive total compensation package
- Employee-led remote and flexible working
- Health benefits
- Samsara for Good charity fund
