Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer

Samsara•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Samsara builds a cloud-connected sensor platform that collects observations in near real time. Its products include battery-powered wireless sensors, Linux-based IoT gateways, and internet-connected dashcams, which support enterprise solutions in areas such as commercial fleet management and industrial monitoring. In this role, you will develop software that runs on millions of devices deployed by industrial and enterprise customers. The work spans hardware selection and bring-up, sensor integration, data collection and event detection, and structuring recorded data for efficient analysis across device fleets. Samsara uses C on MCU-based platforms, Golang for embedded Linux applications and backend services, Google protocol buffers, and AWS technologies; prior experience with those exact technologies is not required. You will collaborate across hardware, firmware, product, full-stack, mobile, cloud, and quality teams to take devices from concept through launch. At the Senior level, you will also provide technical leadership, mentorship, and sound engineering judgment, helping the team deliver high-quality solutions and connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.

Requirements

8 or more years of experience building firmware for resource-constrained systems.
Experience delivering reliable firmware while managing limited memory, processing power, energy, and timing.
Experience leading firmware development for multiple new products from concept through launch.
Substantial bare-metal and RTOS experience, such as Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent.
Experience with scheduling, memory, and timing decisions, and familiarity with mutexes and semaphores.
Experience bringing up new boards and debugging issues across software, libraries, schematics, and hardware components.
Fluency with low-level interfaces including SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, and ADC, and ability to debug hardware/software interactions.
Experience using bench instruments such as an oscilloscope, network analyzer, or RF spectrum analyzer.
Senior-level ability to lead work across hardware, firmware, cloud, and quality from concept through product launch, and to drive consensus across teams.
Ability to assess how low-level technical decisions affect customer experience and make cross-layer trade-offs deliberately.
Fluency in C, including understanding compiler behavior and reading linker maps, stack traces, and corrupted heaps.
Ability to ship iteratively and quickly while maintaining quality, supported by automated testing and maintainable code.
Ability to use AI as part of everyday work to increase output without compromising quality.

Nice To Haves

Deep BLE expertise, including understanding the PHY and building performant, power-efficient system orchestration.
Cellular IoT experience, including LTE-M or NB-IoT modem integration, power-state management, and FCC, PTCRB, or carrier approvals.
End-to-end embedded systems security experience, including secure boot, firmware signing, cryptography, and manufacturing-ready key management.
Fleet-scale OTA and device firmware update experience, including A/B partitions and rollback strategies.
Experience with electronics mass-production and quality-assurance processes, including resolving production showstoppers.

Responsibilities

Participate in hardware reviews and help select SoCs, memory, and sensor combinations; validate those choices on prototypes.
Bring up new hardware platforms and prototypes, configure I/O, establish SPI, I2C, UART, and BLE communications, debug system initialization, and validate designs.
Develop and maintain peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, device firmware updates, and core power and connectivity management layers.
Design protocols and hardware management for battery-powered sensors and gateways to improve device life.
Collaborate with product, full-stack, mobile, and quality engineers to ensure firmware data reaches users intact and is useful.
Lead firmware development for new products from concept through architecture, implementation, validation, and launch.
At the Senior level, provide technical leadership through design work, reviews, mentorship, and engineering practice improvements.
Document technical decisions and produce actionable design documents, review comments, and post-mortems.
Iterate on customer feedback while maintaining quality through automated testing and maintainable code.