Tech Lead Applied Scientist

Overview

The most senior individual contributor on the Safety AI team, leading the technical design and implementation of critical real-time perception systems that run across millions of edge devices and the cloud, taking models from research to production in safety-critical systems.

What you'll do

• Architect end-to-end computer vision pipelines for real-world safety detection, including object detection, tracking, semantic segmentation, multi-camera fusion, and beyond
• Drive the technical roadmap for edge and cloud perception, including how to optimize and deploy models on constrained hardware without sacrificing accuracy
• Partner closely with hardware and firmware teams to co-design the full stack
• Work with petabyte-scale multimodal data (video, sensor, telematics, diagnostics) to train and iterate on production models
• Stay at the frontier of CV and perception research and translate what matters into shipped product
• Mentor and technically guide senior scientists and engineers across the team
• Bring clarity to ambiguous problems by translating customer and business needs into precise, solvable engineering challenges
• Champion and embed Samsara's cultural principles as the company scales globally and across new offices

What you'll need

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Computer Vision, or a related quantitative field
• 10+ years as a scientist or ML engineer, with experience leading end-to-end AI systems in production
• Deep expertise in computer vision (e.g., object detection, tracking, segmentation) for real-world environments
• Experience with multimodal perception and sensor fusion (e.g., camera, lidar, radar, GPS/IMU)
• Experience with transformer-based architectures and vision-language models (VLMs/VLAs)
• Experience building and deploying real-time or edge ML systems optimized for low-latency inference
• Demonstrated ability to drive systems from research through production deployment, including performance optimization and reliability at scale

Nice to have

• Experience applying perception to real-world systems such as driver assistance, fleet safety, or operations automation
• Publications or patents at top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ICRA, NeurIPS)

Details

• Remote position open to candidates residing in the US
• Annual base salary range of $200,200 to $357,500 USD, varying by approved pay zone, city of residence, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience
• Eligible for an initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff and ongoing refresh opportunities