Senior AI Data Engineer

About the role

Marketing Data and Analytics (MDA) is an integral team within Marketing. Our mission is to strengthen revenue performance by providing marketing and sales teams with the insights, tools, infrastructure, and consultation to make data-driven decisions. This role sits on MDA's Engineering team, working alongside our BI and Data Science teams. We are a scrappy, fast-moving team that takes ambiguous business problems and turns them into data products, AI agents, and automation, all while architecting and maintaining the data infrastructure that powers Samsara's marketing. This role is for someone who thinks on their feet, moves fast, and is comfortable owning problems end to end.

This role is open to candidates residing in the US except the San Francisco Bay Metro Area, NYC Metro Area, and Washington, D.C. 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:

• Design, build, and operate production AI systems, including agent orchestration, tool and API integrations, retrieval pipelines, and the evaluation harnesses that keep them reliable and trustworthy.
• Architect and maintain marketing databases, datasets, pipelines, and Samsara's Customer Data Platform (CDP) to enable advanced segmentation, targeting, automation, and analytics.
• Partner with the BI team to expand conversational analytics across the marketing organization.
• Identify and automate manual workflows with AI, taking ideas from concept to prototype to a credible path to production, and delivering efficiency gains across marketing and go-to-market teams.
• Stand up new data pipelines end to end, often for a tool that was onboarded yesterday: discovering the schema, working with partners inside Samsara and at the vendor, getting the data processed, and integrating it into our downstream systems.
• Own the reliability and data quality of what you build.
• Autonomously partner with technical and non-technical stakeholders (Marketing, Sales, R&D, and more) to translate ambiguous business questions into technical requirements and scalable solutions, without dedicated PM support.
• Ship high-quality Python and SQL, increasingly by directing agentic coding tools, while holding a high bar for reviewing and verifying AI-generated work before it reaches production.
• Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and help define best practices for the team.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• 5+ years of working experience in a data engineering or AI engineering role, including meaningful hands-on data engineering experience.
• Expert Python and SQL knowledge with strong hands-on data modeling experience.
• You have built and shipped systems that use LLMs or agents in production as part of your job.
• Agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) are part of your regular workflow. You actively seek out new ways to use AI to accelerate your work, and you verify and take ownership of AI-generated output.
• Deep experience with data warehouse architectures, ETL/ELT, and the modern data stack (e.g., Databricks, DBT, Snowflake, BigQuery, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to lead requirements gathering independently, bridging the gap between business needs and technical implementation, and to spot opportunities for automation through exploratory conversations with stakeholders.
• A self-starter who performs well independently and as a team member, with strong communication and project management skills across technical and non-technical audiences.

An ideal candidate also has:

• A software engineering background beyond data or AI engineering, and a track record of taking ambiguous, unfamiliar problems and turning them into well-architected, delivered solutions.
• Experience directly supporting a business function such as marketing, sales, finance, or business operations.
• Experience working with Databricks.
• Familiarity with go-to-market data and systems: CRM (e.g., Salesforce), marketing automation, web analytics, and CDPs (e.g., Hightouch, Segment).
• Experience evaluating and monitoring LLM systems in production.