Firmware Engineer

Overview

Develop firmware for Samsara's cloud-connected IoT sensor platform, including battery-powered wireless sensors, Linux-based gateways and dashcams, that runs on millions of devices deployed by industrial and enterprise customers.

What you'll do

• Evaluate and select hardware components, including SoC, flash/RAM and sensors, in reviews with electrical engineers, and prove choices out on prototypes.
• Bring up new hardware 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 core 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 designs, reviews and team guidance.

What you'll need

• 2+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems on products that shipped to real customers.
• Fluency in C.
• Solid bare-metal and RTOS experience, such as Zephyr, FreeRTOS or equivalent.
• Experience helping bring up new boards.
• Fluency in low-level interfaces: SPI, I2C, UART, CAN and ADC.
• Bench instincts, including use of an oscilloscope, network analyzer or RF spectrum analyzer.
• Cross-team scope, having contributed to work spanning hardware, firmware, cloud and quality from concept to shipped product.
• Ability to trace how driver-level decisions surface in the customer experience.
• Ability to write design docs, review comments and post-mortems that others can act on.
• Ability to ship fast without shipping poorly, backed by automated testing.
• Use of AI tools in everyday workflow.

Nice to have

• BLE at depth, including PHY 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 and 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, with a track record of fixing production show stoppers.

Details

• Work locations: Remote - Austin; Remote - Seattle; San Francisco, CA, United States.
• Employment type: full-time.
• Annual base salary range: $113,645 to $191,000 USD, varying by approved pay zone and location.
• Eligible for an initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff and ongoing refresh opportunities.