Remote Senior Data Platform Engineer - Samsara US — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
US-Only Remote Role — Geographic Restrictions Apply
This position is explicitly open only to candidates residing in the United States, which significantly limits flexibility for international digital nomads. You must maintain a US residence and the legal right to work in the US. That said, within US borders, this is a genuinely remote, employee-led position with no office requirement mentioned.
Timezone & Schedule Flexibility
Samsara's job description doesn't mandate specific working hours, and the company emphasizes a flexible, employee-led remote model. Data Platform engineering work is often async-friendly by nature (infrastructure, code reviews, distributed systems). However, cross-functional collaboration with US-based teams in product, data science, and security will likely anchor core hours to US business timezones (EST–PST overlap).
Salary vs. Nomad Destinations
The $130,900–$220,000 USD range is strong by any measure. For context:
- Lisbon, Portugal: A comfortable lifestyle runs ~$2,500–$3,500/month. Even at the salary floor, you'd be saving aggressively.
- Bangkok, Thailand: $1,800–$2,800/month covers a high-quality lifestyle, making this salary transformational.
- Medellín, Colombia: ~$1,500–$2,500/month for a comfortable life — exceptional purchasing power.
Travel-Relevant Perks
- Professional development stipend could fund online courses or conferences abroad.
- RSU equity in a NYSE-listed company adds long-term wealth-building potential.
If you're a US citizen or green card holder currently traveling, this role could fund a nomad lifestyle — but you must maintain a US address and comply with US tax residency rules.
Who We Are
Samsara (NYSE: IOT) is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, a platform that enables organizations dependent on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations. Samsara helps improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the physical operations that power our global economy — covering industries representing more than 40% of global GDP, including agriculture, construction, field services, transportation, and manufacturing.
Working at Samsara means helping define the future of physical operations and shaping an exciting array of product solutions, including Video-Based Safety, Vehicle Telematics, Apps and Driver Workflows, and Equipment Monitoring. As part of a recently public company, you'll have the autonomy and support to make an impact as we build for the long term.
About the Role
Samsara is looking for a Senior Software Engineer I to join our Data Platform team, which owns and develops the core analytical platform across Samsara. This team builds and maintains the infrastructure that powers Samsara's data lake, distributed compute platform, and the systems that move data from our production data stores into our lakehouse.
As a Senior Software Engineer on Data Platform, you will design, build, and operate reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure for ingesting, processing, cataloging, and accessing petabytes of data. You will work on the foundational systems that enable engineers, data scientists, analysts, and product teams across Samsara to build customer-facing features, train models, develop operational insights, and support the company's long-term AI and analytics roadmap.
This is a specialized software engineering role focused on data infrastructure. You will work on systems such as Spark and Databricks infrastructure, Delta Lake on S3, data replication from primary data stores such as RDS and DynamoDB, orchestration and metadata services, internal data libraries, and infrastructure tooling across the big data ecosystem.
Note: This role is not an analytics or business data engineering role. If your experience is primarily focused on SQL modeling, BI dashboards, ETL tools, or building business-facing data marts, this role is likely not the right fit. The ideal candidate is a software engineer with deep experience building and operating production data platforms, distributed systems, or large-scale ingestion infrastructure.
This is a remote position open to candidates residing in the US. Relocation assistance will not be provided for this role.
You Should Apply If:
- You want to impact the industries that run our world: The software, firmware, and hardware you build will result in real-world impact — helping to keep the lights on, get food into grocery stores, and most importantly, ensure workers return home safely.
- You want to build for scale: With over 2.3 million IoT devices deployed to global customers, you will work on a range of new and mature technologies driving scalable innovation across industries.
- You are a life-long learner: We have ambitious goals. Every Samsarian has a growth mindset as we work with a wide range of technologies, challenges, and customers that push us to learn on the go.
- You believe customers are more than a number: Samsara engineers enjoy a rare closeness to the end user and have the opportunity to participate in customer interviews, collaborate with customer success and product managers, and use metrics to ensure work translates into better customer outcomes.
- You are a team player: Working on our engineering teams requires a mix of independent effort and collaboration. Motivated by our mission, we're all racing toward our connected operations vision — and we intend to win, together.
In This Role, You Will:
- Design, build, and operate high-scale data ingestion and replication systems from Samsara's primary production data stores — including RDS, DynamoDB, internal APIs, and event-driven systems — into our data lakehouse.
- Build and maintain reliable, scalable, and modern data platform infrastructure capable of handling petabytes of data across Samsara's analytics, AI, product, and operational use cases.
- Improve the reliability, observability, scalability, security, and developer experience of Samsara's Spark and Databricks-based data processing platform.
- Develop internal libraries, APIs, frameworks, and tooling in languages such as Go and Python to help teams across Samsara move, process, discover, and access data safely and efficiently.
- Work on foundational data lake and lakehouse technologies, including Delta Lake on S3, data catalogs, metadata services, orchestration systems, and platform automation.
- Collaborate closely with infrastructure, product engineering, data science, analytics, security, and data engineering teams to understand platform needs and deliver durable, scalable solutions.
- Stay connected to modern data platform technologies and help shape Samsara's long-term data infrastructure roadmap, including support for AI, privacy, security, global scale, and customer-facing data products.
- Champion, role model, and embed Samsara's 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.
Minimum Requirements:
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience in production environments.
- 4+ years of experience building or maintaining large-scale production data infrastructure, data platforms, distributed systems, or data lake systems.
- Strong experience with Apache Spark or similar distributed data processing systems.
- Experience operating production infrastructure in AWS, including services such as S3, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, Lambda, or similar.
- Experience designing, building, and operating reliable systems with strong ownership of scalability, observability, security, and operational excellence.
- Proficiency in at least one production programming language such as Go, Python, Scala, or Java.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners, including software engineers, data scientists, analysts, security teams, and product stakeholders.
Ideal Candidates Also Have:
- Experience with Databricks, Delta Lake, or similar lakehouse technologies such as Iceberg or Hudi.
- Experience building data replication or ingestion systems from OLTP data stores into a data lake or lakehouse.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
- Familiarity with data catalogs, metadata systems, and data discovery tools such as Unity Catalog, Hive Metastore, DataHub, or Amundsen.
- Experience with orchestration systems such as Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect.
- Experience with streaming data, event-driven architectures, or systems that handle late-arriving or mutable data.
- Familiarity with containerization or orchestration technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, or Fargate.
- Experience building internal platforms, libraries, or developer tooling used by other engineering teams.
- Experience contributing to data infrastructure roadmaps, evaluating new technologies, and driving improvements that create leverage for internal and external customers.
Compensation
The range of annual base salary for full-time employees for this position is $130,900 – $220,000 USD. Base pay offered may vary depending on factors including your city of residence, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. This role is also eligible for an initial RSU grant with no vesting cliff, and ongoing refresh opportunities tied to performance, subject to plan terms and conditions.
Total Rewards
At Samsara, we build for the people who keep the global economy moving. Our compensation program delivers above-market total compensation through a combination of base salary, performance-based bonus/variable pay, and equity (for eligible roles) in a high-growth public company. We meaningfully differentiate pay for our top performers, who have the opportunity to earn above-market compensation that can outpace the broader market over time.
Beyond compensation, we provide the foundations that enable long-term success: a flexible, employee-led remote model, a professional development stipend, comprehensive health and parental leave plans, and more.
Flexible Working
At Samsara, we embrace a flexible working model that caters to the diverse needs of our teams. Our offices are open for those who prefer to work in-person, and we also support remote work where it aligns with our operational requirements. All offers of employment are contingent upon an individual's ability to secure and maintain the legal right to work at the company and in the specified work location, if applicable.
Belonging at Samsara
At Samsara, we welcome everyone regardless of their background. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, and other characteristics protected by law.
Accommodations
Samsara is an inclusive work environment, and we are committed to ensuring equal opportunity in employment for qualified persons with disabilities. Please email [email protected] or click here if you require any reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process.
Our Commitment to Authenticity
We use Tofu, a fraud detection tool, to validate the authenticity of applications and protect against identity fraud. Please see Samsara's Candidate Privacy Notice for more information.
Fraudulent Employment Offers
Samsara is aware of scams involving fake job interviews and offers. We do not charge fees to applicants at any stage of the hiring process. Official communication about your application will only come from emails ending in @samsara.com, @us-greenhouse-mail.io, or @mail3.guide.co. For more information regarding fraudulent employment offers, please visit our blog post here.