Manager, Automation Engineering

About Samsara Hardware Engineering: 

Samsara's hardware systems bridge the gap for the rapidly evolving world of physical operations to a cloud platform that enables our customers to increase the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the operations that power the global economy. The hardware footprint is big – we build ultra low power sensors, ruggedized asset trackers, vehicle ADAS systems with AI/ML, telematics systems, rackmount video inspection with AI/Ml and maybe much more. We leverage a myriad of technologies including low power MCUs, beefy SoCs, DSPs, LTE, GPS, BLE, WiFi, imaging sensors, ML/AI/CV, accelerometers, and more. Our challenges span the gamut from eeking out single digit microamps to thermals to desense to cost reduction to antenna design to enclosure design that survives extreme environments.  

About the role:

We’re looking for an Automation Manager to join our team and lead the team building our Automation and Test Framework. This team is responsible for building solutions connecting critical infrastructure ranging from trailers to construction equipment to heavy machinery to the cloud so our customers can better operate.

Samsara’s Automation team enables an exceptional customer experience by building reliable products, identifying opportunities to improve customer experience, and engaging cross-functionally to resolve key issues. In this role, a successful candidate will help build our Automation Test Framework. This key role will enable teams to ship high quality products, ship FW updates to our customers faster, and facilitate quality investigations.

You will lead the team to build a framework that facilitates testing and automation across SW, FW, and HW. Your team will build tools that enable new capabilities and expand our ability to automate systems and test in an efficient manner. Your team will build tools to test technologies including GPS, LTE, BLE and WiFi and work on products that are both battery powered and externally powered.

This is a remote position open to candidates residing in the US except the San Francisco Bay Area and NYC Metro Area.

You should apply if:

• You want to impact the industries that run our world: Your efforts will result in real-world impact—helping to keep the lights on, get food into grocery stores, reduce emissions, and most importantly, ensure workers return home safely.
• You are the architect of your own career: If you put in the work, this role won’t be your last at Samsara. We set up our employees for success and have built a culture that encourages rapid career development, countless opportunities to experiment and master your craft in a hyper growth environment.
• You’re energized by our opportunity: The vision we have to digitize large sectors of the global economy requires your full focus and best efforts to bring forth creative, ambitious ideas for our customers.
• You want to be with the best: At Samsara, we win together, celebrate together and support each other. You will be surrounded by a high-calibre team that will encourage you to do your best.

In this role, you will: 

• Manage a team of 5-10 automation engineers working on multiple products in different stages of development.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship in automated systems development.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with hardware, firmware, and full-stack engineering to develop new tools and features and improve existing ones.
• Lead the team to develop an end-to-end automation strategy to facilitate testing activities throughout Samsara product life cycles. 
• Work with leadership on the planning and execution of quarterly roadmaps that balance product and engineering priorities for maximum customer impact.
• Build a healthy collaborative culture of accountability and continuous improvement while setting a high standard for execution quality.
• Architect and design software frameworks to meet the reliability, scalability, and performance requirements of our products. 

Minimum requirements for the role:

• 10 years experience building automated test frameworks and software tools for product development and validation.
• 5+ years of hands-on execution-oriented technical management experience.
• Understanding of framework architectures and tradeoffs between efficiency, scalability, and performance.
• Software development experience.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work well in a diverse fast paced customer-focused environment.
• Experience creating and implementing hardware-in-the-loop simulation.
• Technical understanding of communication protocols (TCP, UART, and wireless).
• Ability to design and develop hardware infrastructure for test applications. (e.g. power measurement tools, RF testing, etc.).
• Experience with test instrumentation including the use of power supplies, power analyzers, battery simulators, call boxes, and GPS simulators.

An ideal candidate also has:

• Experience building and maintaining automation testing infrastructure from the ground up.
• Experience testing devices with wireless protocols including BLE, WiFi, LTE, and GNSS.
• Experience interfacing with embedded systems’ command line interfaces and AT commands.
• Experience with cloud architecture and solutions.
• Experience with data analysis tools/packages such as SQL, Pandas, databricks, etc.
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