Firmware Engineer

Wwshemi; Austin, Seattle, San Francisco (TX, WA, CA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Samsara is seeking a Firmware Engineer to build software for millions of IoT devices, spanning hardware bring-up, driver layers, and embedded protocols. You will collaborate with hardware, systems, and product teams to ensure reliable operation across fleets and applications.

You will work on SoC selection, sensor integration, and power management to maximize device life while delivering robust firmware updates and security throughout the product lifecycle.

Qualifications

• 2+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems.
• Fluency in C; reads linker maps and traces.
• Experience with bare-metal and RTOS environments (Zephyr/FreeRTOS).

Responsibilities

• Shape hardware design decisions with electrical engineers and select SoC, flash/RAM, and sensors.
• Bring up new boards and platforms from virgin silicon and validate with prototypes.
• Develop peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, and device firmware update flows.

Skills

Firmware development

C programming

RTOS experience

Bare-metal

Tools

Zephyr RTOS

FreeRTOS

Job description

Who we are

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 Firmware 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.

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 help choose 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.

• Build 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.

• Raise the bar for the engineers around you. Your designs, reviews, and instincts help 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

• 2+ 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.

• Solid bare-metal and RTOS experience - Zephyr, FreeRT