Staff Firmware Engineer

Samsara•San Francisco, CA

6d•$162,400 - $290,000•Remote

About The Position

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/Staff 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.

Requirements

8+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems, on products that shipped to real customers and then had to survive in the field.
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.
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.
Staff-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.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.
Embedded Linux on the gateway side - Yocto or Buildroot, kernel drivers, device trees.
CAN and J1939 work on commercial vehicles, including reverse-engineering data bus parameters across makes and models.
Python and Bash for tooling, and hardware-in-the-loop test automation.
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.

Responsibilities

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.
Set the bar for the engineers around you. At Staff level you are a force multiplier: your designs, reviews, and instincts raise the ceiling for the whole team. You will help shape how Samsara works, keep a high bar, be intellectually honest, work with urgency and deliver iteratively, as we scale globally and across new offices.