Principal Firmware Engineer

Samsara (NYSE: IOT) is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, which is a platform that enables organizations that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations. At Samsara, we are helping improve the safety, efficiency and sustainability of the physical operations that power our global economy. Representing more than 40% of global GDP, these industries are the infrastructure of our planet, including agriculture, construction, field services, transportation, and manufacturing — and we are excited to help digitally transform their operations at scale.

Working at Samsara means you’ll help define the future of physical operations and be on a team that’s shaping an exciting array of product solutions, including Video-Based Safety, Vehicle Telematics, Apps and Driver Workflows, and Equipment Monitoring. As part of a recently public company, you’ll have the autonomy and support to make an impact as we build for the long term.

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/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.
This role is remote for applicants residing in the United States or Canada.

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.

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.
• 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.

What you bring

• 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.

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.
• 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.

$162,400 — $290,000 USD

Total Rewards

At Samsara, we build for the people who keep the global economy moving. We want owners, not passengers, which is why our rewards are designed to fuel high-impact builders. Our compensation program delivers above-market total compensation through a combination of base salary, performance-based bonus/variable pay, and equity (for eligible roles) in a high-growth public company. We meaningfully differentiate pay for our top performers, who have the opportunity to earn above-market compensation that can outpace the broader market over time.

Beyond compensation, we provide the foundations that enable long-term success: a flexible, employee-led remote model, a professional development stipend, comprehensive health and parental leave plans, and more. If you’re ready to build for the long term and own the outcome, your journey starts here.

Flexible Working

At Samsara, we embrace a flexible working model that caters to the diverse needs of our teams. Our offices are open for those who prefer to work in-person and we also support remote work where it aligns with our operational requirements. For certain positions, being close to one of our offices or within a specific geographic area is important to facilitate collaboration, access to resources, or alignment with our service regions. In these cases, the job description will clearly indicate any working location requirements. Our goal is to ensure that all members of our team can contribute effectively, whether they are working on-site, in a hybrid model, or fully remotely. All offers of employment are contingent upon an individual’s ability to secure and maintain the legal right to work at the company and in the specified work location, if applicable.

Belonging at Samsara

At Samsara, we welcome everyone regardless of their background. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, and other characteristics protected by law. We depend on the unique approaches of our team members to help us solve complex problems and want to ensure that Samsara is a place where people from all backgrounds can make an impact.

Accommodations

Samsara is an inclusive work environment, and we are committed to ensuring equal opportunity in employment for qualified persons with disabilities. Please email View email address on click.appcast.io or click here if you require any reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process.

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Samsara's Mission

Improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the operations that power the global economy.