Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer

About the Role

Samsara’s cloud-connected sensor platform collects observations about the world in near real-time, building battery-powered wireless sensors, Linux-based IoT gateways, and Internet-connected dashcams. Through the integration of sensor data such as GPS, acceleration, temperature, and video, we enable our customers to gain insights into operations, eliminate inefficiencies, and react to alerts.

As a Senior Embedded Software Engineer at Samsara, you will develop software running on millions of devices deployed by industrial and enterprise customers. You will evaluate and select hardware components, bring up new hardware platforms and sensors, build data-gathering systems, and structure recorded data for efficient analysis.

Responsibilities

• Shape the hardware: Participate in reviews with electrical engineers to select SoCs, flash/RAM, and sensors, proving choices out on rapid prototypes.
• Board Bring-up: Bring up new platforms and prototypes from virgin silicon (configure I/O, SPI, I2C, UART, BLE, debug system init, and validate design).
• Core firmware layers: Own peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, device firmware updates (DFU), power management, and connectivity layers.
• Power optimization: Design protocols and hardware management for battery-powered sensors and gateways.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with product, full-stack, mobile, and quality engineers to ensure telemetry arrives reliably.
• Technical leadership: Provide thoughtful designs, rigorous code reviews, hands-on mentorship, and sound technical judgment.

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems with tight memory, processing, energy, and timing constraints.
• Track record of leading firmware development for several products end-to-end, from concept through architecture, launch, and validation.
• Substantial bare-metal and RTOS experience (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent), including scheduling, memory, timing, mutexes, and semaphores.
• Proven experience bringing up unproven hardware and working alongside electrical engineers at the bench.
• Fluency in low-level interfaces: SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, ADC, and debugging hardware-software interfaces.
• Bench proficiency using oscilloscopes, network analyzers, or RF spectrum analyzers.
• Fluency in C, including deep understanding of compiler output, linker maps, stack traces, and heap management.
• Clear technical communication through design documents, code reviews, and post-mortems.

Preferred / Set You Apart

• Deep knowledge of BLE down to the PHY level, optimized for performance and power efficiency.
• Cellular IoT experience (LTE-M, NB-IoT modem integration, power states, FCC/PTCRB/carrier certification).
• End-to-end embedded systems security (secure boot, firmware signing, cryptography, key management).
• Fleet-scale OTA and device firmware update architectures (A/B partitions, rollback mechanisms).
• Experience with factory mass production and electronics QA processes.