Senior Manager, Quality Engineering
About The Position
Samsara is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead its Test Infrastructure and Quality Engineering organization. This role involves leading a multidisciplinary team of engineering managers, software engineers, and quality engineers focused on preventing, detecting, and resolving regressions within Samsara’s Connected Operations Cloud. The teams will leverage quality-engineering expertise, scalable infrastructure, automation, and product validation to ensure reliable customer experiences. The organization will be responsible for building and operating shared test platforms, frameworks, environments, data systems, and developer workflows to make high-quality testing accessible to all engineers. Additionally, the role will empower Quality Engineering Individual Contributors (ICs) with the necessary tools, standards, and practices for effective automated and exploratory testing, failure investigation, and providing quality signals throughout the development lifecycle. This position is central to engineering productivity, product quality, and customer trust. The successful candidate will establish Samsara’s quality strategy, define measurable standards for regression prevention and release confidence, and collaborate with engineering and product leaders to integrate quality earlier in the development process. As Samsara’s products and engineering organization grow, this role will ensure testing capabilities scale accordingly, enhancing coverage and signal quality while minimizing test latency, flakiness, and manual effort.
Requirements
- 10+ years of relevant software engineering, developer infrastructure, test engineering, or quality engineering experience.
- 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, including experience managing other managers and leading organizations containing both managers and senior ICs.
- A track record of building and scaling shared test infrastructure, automation frameworks, developer platforms, or quality systems used by multiple engineering teams.
- Deep knowledge of modern testing strategies across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, reliability, mobile, web, API, and distributed backend systems.
- Demonstrated success using metrics and engineering mechanisms to materially reduce escaped regressions and improve release confidence.
- Strong technical depth and the ability to guide architecture, review technical designs, evaluate implementation quality, and make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.
- Experience creating high-signal CI/CD quality gates while balancing test coverage, execution speed, reliability, and developer productivity.
- A strong understanding of exploratory and manual testing and where human judgment provides value beyond automation.
- Experience driving adoption of horizontal platforms through intuitive APIs, documentation, enablement, stakeholder partnership, and a strong internal customer orientation.
- The ability to influence engineering and product leaders, establish shared accountability for quality, and lead complex initiatives across organizational boundaries.
- Experience operating quality systems for large-scale cloud, mobile, IoT, hardware-integrated, or distributed products.
- Excellent communication, organizational leadership, and talent-development skills.
Nice To Haves
- Backend is written in Golang, runs on AWS, and is deployed using Terraform, though direct experience with these technologies is not required.
Responsibilities
- Lead and develop an organization of engineering managers, software engineers, and quality engineers responsible for test infrastructure, automation, and product-quality validation.
- Define the vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap for quality engineering and shared testing platforms across Samsara.
- Build scalable, self-service test infrastructure—including frameworks, environments, test data, device and service simulators, and CI/CD integrations—that can be adopted by engineering teams across the company.
- Establish measurable quality outcomes, including escaped-regression rates, automated coverage, test reliability, time to signal, defect-detection effectiveness, and release confidence.
- Drive a shift-left quality strategy that improves system testability and makes quality an integral part of architecture, development, code review, and continuous delivery.
- Partner with product engineering teams to identify high-risk customer journeys, close critical coverage gaps, and prevent recurring classes of regressions.
- Improve the reliability and usefulness of automated testing by reducing flaky tests, shortening feedback loops, and making failures easy to diagnose and act upon.
- Ensure Quality Engineering ICs have effective tooling and operating mechanisms for exploratory testing, complex end-to-end validation, release qualification, and regression analysis.
- Introduce intelligent and AI-assisted capabilities for test generation, failure classification, root-cause analysis, coverage identification, and quality insights.
- Build a strong technical and leadership bench by hiring, coaching, and developing inclusive, highly engaged, and high-performing teams.
- Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles as the organization scales globally.
Benefits
- Flexible working model
- Professional development stipend
- Comprehensive health and parental leave plans
- Above-market total compensation through a combination of base salary, performance-based bonus/variable pay, and equity (for eligible roles)
- Initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff, and ongoing refresh opportunities tied to performance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
