Firmware Engineer

Overview

Develop firmware that runs on millions of Samsara IoT devices, including battery-powered sensors, Linux-based gateways and dashcams, used by industrial and enterprise customers.

What you'll do

• Help choose SoCs, flash/RAM and sensor combinations by reviewing hardware decisions with electrical engineers and validating them on prototypes.
• Bring up new platforms and prototypes from virgin silicon: configure I/O, get SPI, I2C, UART and BLE working, debug system init and validate the design.
• Build peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, device firmware updates, and power and connectivity management layers.
• Design protocols and hardware management for battery-powered sensors and gateways to maximize device life.
• Partner with product, full-stack, mobile and quality engineers so firmware data arrives intact and useful to end users.
• Raise the engineering bar through design, reviews and guidance for the team.

What you'll need

• 2+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems on products that shipped to customers and were supported in the field.
• Fluency in C.
• Solid bare-metal and RTOS experience, such as Zephyr, FreeRTOS or equivalent.
• Experience helping bring up new boards, including first power-on of unproven hardware.
• Fluency in low-level interfaces: SPI, I2C, UART, CAN and ADC.
• Bench debugging skills with tools such as an oscilloscope, network analyzer or RF spectrum analyzer.
• Contribution to cross-team work spanning hardware, firmware, cloud and quality from concept to shipped product.
• Ability to trace how driver-level decisions affect customer experience.
• Ability to write design docs, review comments and post-mortems.
• Ability to iterate quickly on customer feedback, backed by automated testing.

Nice to have

• BLE at depth, including PHY-level understanding and performant, power-efficient orchestration.
• Cellular IoT: LTE-M or NB-IoT modem integration, power state management and certification (FCC, PTCRB, carrier approval).
• Securing embedded systems end to end: secure boot, firmware signing, cryptography and key management.
• OTA and device firmware update at fleet scale: A/B partitions, rollback.
• Embedded Linux on gateways: Yocto or Buildroot, kernel drivers, device trees.
• CAN and J1939 work on commercial vehicles, including reverse-engineering data bus parameters.
• Python and Bash for tooling and hardware-in-the-loop test automation.
• Understanding of mass production and quality assurance of electronics, and experience fixing production show stoppers.

Details

• Location: Remote in Austin or Seattle, or based in San Francisco, CA, United States.
• Annual base salary range: $113,645 to $191,000 USD, depending on primary work location, city of residence, and job-related knowledge, skills and experience.
• Eligible for an initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff, plus ongoing refresh opportunities.
• Offers contingent on the legal right to work at the company and in the specified work location.