[Hiring] Staff Design Engineer @Academy

Role Description

As a Staff Design Engineer at Samsara, you will provide critical technical design expertise and execution for strategic initiatives, delivering end-to-end experiences that impact customers and support key business objectives. You'll own design and interaction quality for our AI platform — shaping how intelligent, agentic experiences look, feel, and behave across every surface. This role sits at the intersection of exceptional visual craft, interaction design, and engineering — you'll bridge design and engineering, understand how AI-powered products are built, and help elevate the overall polish and craft bar for how they're designed, implemented, and shipped.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of product design experience designing UX/UI for web and mobile applications, with a track record of staff-level scope and impact.
• Exceptional visual design craft — demonstrated mastery of typography, layout, spacing, and detail — combined with strong interaction and motion design skills, and a proven ability to set craft standards others follow.
• Strong front-end coding ability — comfortable generating or co-writing production-quality code, not just prototyping.
• Direct experience designing AI or agentic workflow products.
• Portfolio and/or case studies showcasing design craft and ability to solve user problems with quantified impact — required to be considered. Ideal portfolio work is self-authored: projects where you were the sole designer and either generated or co-wrote the code yourself.
• Fluency with vibe coding and AI-assisted design tools to prototype, validate, and ship.
• Experience prototyping and shipping in real codebases; strong comfort working in GitHub.
• Track record of driving design direction across multiple teams or surfaces without heavy oversight.
• Proven experience in fast-paced, high-growth environments.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, including influencing engineering and product leadership.
• Experience building or contributing to design systems a plus, but not the focus of this role.

Requirements

• Extremely high visual and interaction design polish and craft is the top priority for this role — pixel-level attention to detail, refined taste, and a strong eye for typography, spacing, and visual hierarchy, paired with the technical ability to build it.
• Strong systems thinker — able to design patterns that hold up in production, not just in prototypes.
• Knows what good code looks like and can both write it and help set up the broader team to implement well — craft and technical fluency go hand in hand for this role, neither is optional.
• Strong point of view on motion and interaction design (brand/marketing design experience is not a focus for this role).
• Comfortable with 0→1 and early-stage work where the path isn't fully defined, especially in a fast-evolving AI/agentic product space.
• Self-directed and resourceful — can identify what needs to happen and move it forward without heavy structure.
• Product intuition and process experience are a plus but not required — visual craft, interaction quality, and technical fluency are the priority.
• Curious, hands-on, and resilient — able to zoom out strategically and zoom in to deliver polished, shipped work.
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Figma Make).

Benefits

• Duration: 6 months (with conversion potential if based in a country where Samsara has legal entities).
• Hours: 40 hrs/week, no overtime.
• Location: Fully remote.
• Rate: $90-$110/hr.
• Start: ASAP.

Work Location & Eligibility

This is a fully remote contract role. Candidates based in a Samsara entity country are strongly preferred.

• Eligible countries are:
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Poland
• India
• Taiwan
• Mexico

All offers are contingent upon an individual's ability to secure and maintain the legal right to work in their respective country.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.