I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Samsara (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2017
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn and spoke with her a few times. We had a conversation with one of their senior engineers on the phone and after some questions, he thought I was a good fit and should come onsite. Unfortunately, at the time they were offering less than my current position.
After two weeks, the recruiter called again saying they are now willing to up the salary limit and wanted me to come in for an interview. The interview was suppose to be a four round onsite interview (2 technical, 2 soft). The day before the interview, one of the technical interviewers (the original engineer I spoke with) was not available anymore. On the day of the interview at 7:30am, I got a call from the recruiter telling me the other technical interviewer was also not going to show up but they still wanted me to come onsite.
This obviously caused me some concern. So I had two soft interviews and I repeated ask what would happen with the technical interviews, the recruiter told me we can do a phone interview again. Throughout the two interviews, the most technical question I was asked was "Do you write code in your day to day on the job?" I told them no I script mostly but I code regularly on my own time and I worked as a developer before as well as running a startup. At this point, my interviewer started getting clearly annoyed for some reason and no longer want to interview me. After which, he only followed with generic questions that repeatedly just asked me what my current day to day is like.
The day after the interview at 9am. I got a call saying I was not technical enough for the position. I was a bit shocked to say the least. I would have expected at least a technical interview before they made that decision.
I applied online. I interviewed at Samsara (Atlanta, GA)
Interview
The interview process took a total of 30 min. It consisted of a zoom call with an HR . Asked basic questions about my resume, there was a total of 5 questions total and I get to ask questions after.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Samsara (Detroit, MI)
Interview
The interview process is quite taxing. 2-3 calls with recruiting, then you have about 5 panel interviews and conclude the process with an installation. The process is borderline unethical considering all the time they demand from you. I made it to the final stage of the process before they notified me I should reapply in “a few months” because they didn’t actually have an active job opening. They also added that I had flaws in my skillset that were identified by every interviewer which seemed like a cop out for not having an open position. Maybe they didn’t like my experience, but it would have been better to know before I wasted 9 hours of my life during business hours. Seems like a good gig if you can land it, but my takeaways were they spend a lot of time doing empty talent pipelining with no regard to your schedule. The interviewers were generally unable to describe their day-to-day alluding to the role basically being sitting on calls and offering technical support when needed. I would also say that they are moderately unwilling to take your questions and it’s very much an evaluation of you rather than you determining if it’s a fit.
I applied online. I interviewed at Samsara in Nov 2025
Interview
Lengthy, mostly behavioral. 30 minute call with the recruiter, 45 minute call with the hiring manager, virtual onsite with three peers (45 minutes each), followed by a take-home assignment and a 30 minute demo of the assignment. Turnaround for next steps after each round was within a few hours. Mostly they want to know that you can work with APIs, write some basic scripts, install their hardware (very easy and takes minutes), and explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience while emphasizing business value of the product. Everyone throughout the interview process was incredibly friendly and made Samsara sound like a genuinely great place to work; they made sure all of my questions were answered and that I could get a good feel for if I thought the company would be a good fit for me, not just focusing on if I would be a good fit for the company. Obviously, it was a decent amount of time invested, but I never felt nervous or stressed due to how well-structured and responsive everyone involved was.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is your experience with APIs? What is your experience with hardware (multimeter, soldering)? Talk about a time when you had to explain a technical concept to someone who was non-technical. Give an example of how you demonstrate ROI to a costumer.
