About the role
The In-Vehicle Experience team at Samsara built its foundation at the edge: six firmware engineers shipping the software that runs on dash cams in hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Now the roadmap is expanding into AI-powered voice agents, real-time audio orchestration, and driver feedback systems, and the team is standing up its software engineering function for the first time. You'd be the first dedicated SWE and the team's technical anchor from day one.
The problem space is unusual: a truck cab where a driver's attention is limited, multiple AI-driven systems are competing to speak, and every decision has to be right the first time. Today, these products don't exist yet. You'll define what to build, design the systems behind it, and ship it. The starting point is always the driver's experience.
You'll work primarily in backend systems that orchestrate agentic, voice, and real-time experiences running at the edge. The team's firmware engineers own the device side. You'll need to understand edge constraints well enough to design APIs and service contracts they can consume, but this is a backend and AI role.
AI-assisted engineering is central to how you'll work. You'll use tools like Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor throughout the development lifecycle: investigation, design, code generation, testing, review, and operations.
Responsibilities
- Define what to build and how to build it, shaping product direction from the engineering side
- Own the technical direction for orchestrating concurrent, real-time interactions to deliver one coherent experience for the driver
- Build and ship new AI-powered products from zero to one in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment
- Design systems that coordinate across backend and edge boundaries, where reliability and real-time responsiveness both matter
- Make architectural tradeoffs where requirements are still evolving, favoring foundations that generalize over narrowly-scoped solutions
- Establish patterns for reliability, observability, and explainability in systems that make real-time decisions
- Serve as the team's technical anchor: review designs, unblock decisions, and mentor firmware engineers as they grow into full-stack contributors
- Bring in outside ideas and practices for full-stack and AI-assisted development
- Champion the Samsara cultural principles (Focus on Customer Success, Build for the Long Term, Adopt a Growth Mindset, Be Inclusive, Win as a Team) as we scale globally
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including ownership of products from concept through production
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong programming fundamentals (Golang, Python, or similar)
- Experience building products on top of LLMs or AI agent platforms
- Experience designing reliable, distributed backend systems that support multi-step, asynchronous workflows
- Experience designing backend systems that serve edge, embedded, or resource-constrained clients
- Experience with quality and safety considerations for AI-driven systems: validating outputs, structured responses, retries/fallbacks, and monitoring
- Experience mentoring engineers as they expand into unfamiliar technical domains
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical direction without formal authority
- Located in and authorized to work in the United States or Canada (fully remote)
Conditions
- Annual base salary: $154,700 - $260,000 USD
- Eligible for initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff, and ongoing refresh opportunities tied to performance