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Salary: USD 162,400 - 290,000 / annual
Samsara (NYSE: IOT) is the pioneer of the Connected Operations Cloud, a platform enabling organizations to harness IoT data for actionable insights across physical operations including agriculture, construction, field services, transportation, and manufacturing.
As a Senior Firmware Engineer, you will develop software running on millions of deployed devices, tackling challenges including hardware component evaluation, new platform bring-up, event detection systems, and efficient data structuring for analysis across thousands of devices. The role involves working with C for MCU-based platforms, Golang for Linux-based gateways, Google protocol buffers, and AWS technologies.
Key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating with electrical engineers on hardware architecture decisions (SoC selection, memory, sensors) and validating choices through prototypes reaching customers within months
- Bringing up new platforms from virgin silicon: configuring I/O, debugging system initialization, validating designs, and turning unproven hardware into products
- Owning foundational layers including peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, device firmware updates, power management, and connectivity systems
- Optimizing battery-powered sensors and gateways, where firmware quality is measured in years of device life
- Partnering with product, full-stack, mobile, and quality engineers to ensure data integrity and usefulness for end users
- Raising the bar for team engineers through thoughtful designs, rigorous reviews, hands-on mentorship, and sound technical judgment; leading by example and connecting technical decisions to customer and business outcomes
You will work in a hyper-growth environment with autonomy and support to make long-term impact. The role emphasizes iterative shipping, automated testing, design documentation, and intelligent use of AI tools.
Requirements:
- 8+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems with expertise in measuring and optimizing memory, processing power, energy, and timing trade-offs
- Led firmware development for several new products end-to-end from concept through architecture, implementation, validation, and launch, providing hands-on technical leadership
- Substantial bare-metal and RTOS experience (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent) with proficiency in scheduling, memory, and timing decisions
- Experience bringing up new boards: first power-on of unproven hardware, debugging at the seam between hardware and software
- Fluency in low-level interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, ADC) and ability to debug hardware-software integration
- Bench instincts: comfortable using oscilloscopes, network analyzers, and RF spectrum analyzers to form hypotheses
- Senior-level scope: led work spanning hardware, firmware, cloud, and quality from concept to shipped product; driven consensus across teams
- Cross-layer judgment: ability to trace how driver-level decisions surface in customer experience and make deliberate trade-offs
- Fluency in C with understanding of compiler behavior, linker maps, stack traces, and heap corruption
- Strong written communication: design docs, review comments, and post-mortems that other engineers can act on
- Ability to ship fast without compromising quality; comfortable iterating on customer feedback backed by automated testing
- Smart use of AI as part of daily workflow
Differentiators (not required but valued):
- BLE expertise at depth, including PHY-level understanding and performant power-efficient orchestration
- Cellular IoT experience (LTE-M, NB-IoT modem integration, power state management, FCC/PTCRB/carrier certification)
- End-to-end embedded systems security (secure boot, firmware signing, cryptography, key management)
- OTA and fleet-scale device firmware updates (A/B partitions, rollback, production reliability)
- Factory floor experience with mass production and quality assurance processes; track record fixing production issues
