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About This Role
Who we are
Samsara (NYSE: IOT) is the pioneer of the Connected Operations™ Cloud, which is a platform that enables organizations that depend on physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations. At Samsara, we are helping improve the safety, efficiency and sustainability of the physical operations that power our global economy. Representing more than 40% of global GDP, these industries are the infrastructure of our planet, including agriculture, construction, field services, transportation, and manufacturing — and we are excited to help digitally transform their operations at scale.
Working at Samsara means you'll help define the future of physical operations and be on a team that's 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's Finance \& Strategy team is seeking a technically skilled builder to lead the development, implementation, and maintenance of Finance's data foundation and AI systems. Our team drives strategic decisions at Samsara — owning the forecasting, planning, analysis and reporting that leadership relies on to run the business. This role will work closely with our F\&S team and partner across BizTech, PeopleOps, Accounting and beyond, acting as our technical bridge with systems owners, data engineers and the business.
You'll design, develop and operate secure, scalable applications, pipelines, automations and AI workflows that transform fragmented financial data from NetSuite, Workday, Adaptive and Salesforce into a modern Databricks foundation that powers production\-grade, decision\-ready systems. You will also own and support our existing Workday Adaptive Planning instance through the transition. If you're energized by applying data engineering and AI to transform how our Finance \& Strategy team utilizes data, this is a rare opportunity to build the future state of a finance function from the data layer up. We value intensity, pace, and curiosity — moving quickly to deliver practical solutions while continuously raising the bar on what Finance can do with its data.
This role is open to candidates residing in the US.
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. Youwill be surrounded by a high\-calibre team that will encourage you to do your best.
In this role, you will:
- Own the data foundation and AI roadmap for Finance \& Strategy — architecting the future state of Samsara's financial data and systems landscape, setting modeling strategy, and identifying and closing gaps in data, tools, and processes, while also maintaining and evolving the existing Workday Adaptive Planning instance, ensuring reliability and continuity for the business through the transition
- Design, build, and maintain the pipelines and integrations connecting Samsara's financial systems (e.g., Databricks, NetSuite, Workday, Adaptive, Salesforce) to ensure seamless data flow, scalability, and reliability
- Build Samsara's agentic\-first close, and extend AI\-powered tools and automations across core finance processes — forecasting and scenario planning, variance and driver analysis, headcount and workforce planning, and management reporting
- Lead cross\-functional alignment across Finance, BizTech, PeopleOps, Accounting and beyond on system workstreams that span teams — resolving competing priorities and driving shared decisions
- Evaluate and implement emerging technologies, staying current on advancements in AI, automation, and data infrastructure, and proactively identifying opportunities for innovation and efficiency
- Formalize best practices in data modeling and infrastructure, and enable end users through documentation, training, technical support, and troubleshooting to drive adoption across the Finance org
- Build with governance in mind — establishing data quality standards and access controls — holding the work accountable to measurable impact on close cycle time and forecast accuracy
- 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, Information Systems, Finance/Accounting, or comparable work experience
- 8\+ years of relevant experience building and scaling production\-grade data pipelines, integrations, and enterprise applications, with strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to independently design and deliver solutions with little or no technical guidance
- Hands\-on experience with large language model (LLM) applications, including prompt engineering, retrieval\-augmented generation, agentic workflows, and evaluation
- Proficiency coding in Python, particularly for scripting, data manipulation, and interacting with APIs
- Experience with SQL databases, including data modeling and query optimization
- Experience with data platforms and warehouses (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift), and with the enterprise systems that feed them (e.g., NetSuite, Workday, Adaptive, Salesforce, Google Suite, Slack)
- Working knowledge of financial planning, forecasting, and close processes to partner credibly with finance stakeholders and translate their workflows into scalable, reliable technical solutions
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills with both technical and non\-technical stakeholders, including comfort presenting to senior management
An ideal candidate also has:
- Strong problem\-solving mindset and curiosity about applying AI to finance processes, with a track record of delivering iterative improvements and measurable outcomes
- Experience building agentic systems in production — orchestration frameworks, tool use, and evaluation techniques beyond prompt engineering
- Experience in a high\-growth or public company finance environment, where reporting and compliance demands evolve quickly
- Ability to thrive in a fast\-growing environment with high degrees of ambiguity
Total Rewards
At Samsara, we build for the people who keep the global economy moving. We want owners, not passengers, which is why our rewards are designed to fuel high\-impact builders. 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. If you're ready to build for the long term and own the outcome, your journey starts here.
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. For certain positions, being close to one of our offices or within a specific geographic area is important to facilitate collaboration, access to resources, or alignment with our service regions. In these cases, the job description will clearly indicate any working location requirements. Our goal is to ensure that all members of our team can contribute effectively, whether they are working on\-site, in a hybrid model, or fully remotely. 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. We depend on the unique approaches of our team members to help us solve complex problems and want to ensure that Samsara is a place where people from all backgrounds can make an impact.
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. This ensures we are connecting with real people and allows us to prioritize genuine candidates. Please see Samsara's Candidate Privacy Notice for more information.
Fraudulent Employment Offers
Samsara is aware of scams involving fake job interviews and offers. Please know 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.
Salary Context
This $146K-$246K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Samsara, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400. This role's midpoint ($196K) sits 9% below the category median. Disclosed range: $146K to $246K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
Samsara AI Hiring
Samsara has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Engineer, AI Architect. Positions span San Francisco, CA, US, Chicago, IL, US, Atlanta, GA, US. Compensation range: $176K - $246K.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $265,000 across 1,335 tracked positions. That's 23% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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