Staff Software Engineer, Routing

About the role

Are you interested in building solutions that help our customers deliver their cargo safely and efficiently while cutting fleet costs? The Routing team at Samsara is building the world's best products for supporting drivers and empowering dispatchers to orchestrate large fleets of light and heavy vehicles.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll set technical direction across the full routing surface area — route optimization, dispatch systems, real-time tracking, and integrations with customer ERP/TMS systems. We're an active 0-to-1 team modeling our customers' real-world operations: delivering to hard-to-reach locations on busy urban streets, maximizing fleet capacity by recommending the right vehicles, and planning for both familiar routes and surprise deliveries — all while staying compliant with the ever-changing rules of commercial navigation. The work leans heavily on distributed systems that handle geospatial and real-time data at scale. You'll mentor senior engineers and partner with product, design, and mobile to ship features customers use every day.

Our stack features Golang for backend services, GraphQL for data fetching, and TypeScript + React for our web client, with React Native for our mobile app. Direct experience with these technologies is not required.

This role is remote and open to candidates based in the US.

You might be a good fit if:

• You want to impact the industries that run our world: The software, firmware, and hardware you build will have real-world impact — helping 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 customers worldwide, you'll work across new and mature technologies that power the world's physical operations.
• 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 — you'll join customer interviews, collaborate with customer success and product managers, and use metrics to ensure our work translates into better customer outcomes.
• You are a team player: Our engineering teams require 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:

• Architect and own critical systems that span route planning and dispatch including route optimization algorithms, dispatch state machines, and real-time tracking infrastructure.
• Design scalable backend services that handle tracking and execution of hundreds of thousands of routes in real time, along with reporting and suggested optimizations to better utilize vehicles, drivers, and take optimal routes to accomplish customer work.
• Build web interfaces and APIs that allow dispatchers and fleet managers to create, assign, and monitor routes and deliveries for their entire organization from a single pane of glass.
• Implement integrations with TMS/ERP systems (including legacy systems such as AS/400 and SAP) that process millions of route events a day.
• Work closely with PMs, designers, and engineers across time zones to ensure cohesive product experiences, balancing generic and long-tail customer needs.
• Mentor senior engineers, set technical direction, and raise the bar for design and code quality across the team.
• Navigate tradeoffs between moving fast and building for the long term, using customer impact as the north star.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across product, sales, and customer success to bring features to market and maintain a tight feedback loop.
• 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 and across new offices.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer, with at least 2 years in an architect or technical leadership role.
• Demonstrated ability executing in ambiguous environments and delivering customer value.
• Strong programming, coding, and design fundamentals.
• Experience designing and architecting large, high-scale distributed systems.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

An ideal candidate also has:

• Proven experience shaping and improving routing products.
• Demonstrated experience with geospatial data, real-time systems, and fleet management platforms.
• A track record of thriving in 0→1 teams and scaling them through the post-startup phase.
• Experience operating as a tech lead or in a similar technical leadership role directly impacting the output of other engineers.
• A passion for mentoring and helping senior and junior engineers grow.
• Experience building for mobile (React Native, iOS/Android), especially GPS/navigation apps.
• The ability and willingness to engage directly with customers when needed.
• Prior startup or founder experience – you know how to move fast and find leverage.