Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer
SF Bay Area · USD 162,400-290,000 / year · 8+ years experience · Remote · Posted Oct 15, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 8+ years experience
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- SF Bay Area
- Salary
- USD 162,400-290,000 / year · Base salary
About the role
- Samsara is seeking a Staff or Senior Firmware Engineer to develop software for millions of IoT devices, including battery-powered sensors, Linux-based gateways, and dashcams.
- The role involves end-to-end product development, from hardware component selection and board bring-up to firmware architecture and production deployment.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with electrical engineers to select hardware components and validate designs on prototypes.
- Perform board bring-up for new platforms, including configuring I/O and debugging system initialization.
- Develop and maintain peripheral drivers, secure bootloaders, and device firmware update mechanisms.
- Manage core system layers such as power and connectivity to ensure device reliability.
- Optimize firmware for battery-powered sensors to maximize device life.
- Partner with product, full-stack, mobile, and quality engineering teams to ensure data integrity.
- Provide technical leadership through design reviews, mentorship, and the establishment of engineering practices.
- Create technical documentation, including design docs and post-mortems.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience building firmware for resource-constrained systems.
- Proven experience leading firmware development for new products from concept through launch.
- Substantial experience with bare-metal and RTOS environments such as Zephyr or FreeRTOS.
- Experience with board bring-up and debugging hardware-software interfaces.
- Fluency in low-level interfaces including SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, and ADC.
- Proficiency in using bench equipment like oscilloscopes, network analyzers, or RF spectrum analyzers.
- Fluency in C programming, including understanding compiler behavior and memory management.
- Ability to drive consensus across cross-functional teams.
Preferred qualifications
- Deep expertise in BLE, including PHY-level understanding and system orchestration.
- Experience with Cellular IoT, specifically LTE-M or NB-IoT modem integration and certification.
- Knowledge of embedded security, including secure boot, firmware signing, and cryptography.
- Experience with OTA and fleet-scale device firmware updates.
- Experience with factory floor processes and mass production quality assurance.
Benefits
- Above market-rate salary
- Outstanding equity offering
- Team-based incentive schemes
- Health benefits
- Personal development stipend
- Samsara for Good fund
- Parental leave plans
Workplace
- Flexible, employee-led remote model.
- Some positions may require proximity to an office for collaboration.
Skills
- C
- Golang
- Zephyr
- FreeRTOS
- SPI
- I2C
- UART
- CAN
- ADC
- BLE
- LTE-M
- NB-IoT
Show all 14 skills
- AWS
- Google Protocol Buffers
