Director, Product Management - Vehicle Platform

About the role:

Telematics is Samsara’s second largest (and original) business. Our product is used by customers of all sizes and in a variety of industries throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. We help customers manage their fleet operations, with real-time tracking and data gathered from vehicles (and sensors) in the field and ingested into our cloud-based platform. Through features spanning routing, maintenance, fuel management, electrification and sustainability, analytics/reporting, mobile device management, compliance with ELD regulations, and extensive 3rd party integrations with our APIs, we are the comprehensive solution and platform for the world of physical operations.

In this role, you will own the Vehicle Platform that powers Samsara’s 1.2M+ vehicle gateways in the field – from firmware functionality that runs on the gateway, including how we collect diagnostic data from vehicle systems and interoperate with connected devices, all the way to our cloud-based Dashboard experience where customers leverage vehicle data, insights, and the downstream features that depend on your team’s platform (e.g. Maintenance, Sustainable Fleet Management, EV features, etc).

We are looking for a technical Product leader with demonstrated experience creating and executing strategy in complex areas that require analytical understanding, subject matter expertise, working through uncertainty, and ultimately staying focused on building for the long-term with steady progress.

This is a remote position open to candidates in the U.S. Relocation assistance will not be provided for this role.

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:

• Create and execute the strategy for how we define, collect, and leverage data from vehicles (spanning light/heavy duty, ICE/electric, etc) used in our customer fleets globally. This also includes finding opportunities to monetize and innovate on top of this data, as well as being proactive in looking at where the vehicle market is going and how Samsara can leverage regulatory and competitive tailwinds.
• Drive our Telematics Platform strategy and execution, ensuring we maintain a high quality set of services and APIs used both internally and externally. These are the bedrock of much of Samsara’s functionality.
• Work closely with our OEM Integrations and Partnerships teams to holistically support the ingestion of vehicle system data, including when it is being provided through OEM cloud APIs rather than Samsara’s own vehicle gateways.
• Collaborate with our Data Science team to define and provide ongoing visibility into our diagnostics coverage and quality. Use data to focus on key gaps to close and how to invest the team’s resources wisely in supporting existing and future customer fleets.
• Drive insights that can be surfaced both internally and to customers, including support for predictive maintenance and other use cases that combine vehicle data and ML.
• Partner closely with our Engineering team (both firmware and full-stack) to ensure your team’s releases maintain high quality and high uptime/connectivity in the field, supporting the feature requirements of both the Telematics product area and dependencies from other product groups.
• Lead quarterly and annual R&D planning cadences for your teams. This includes managing a robust “intake” process to understand vehicle platform needs across our product lines and factoring those into your priorities.
• Collaborate & communicate across product line leadership to share your roadmap, evangelize your priorities, and help advance product-focused initiatives.
• Partner with customer-facing teams to close strategic accounts, resolve escalations, and maintain relationships with top customers.
• Hire, develop and lead an inclusive, engaged, and high performing team of PMs.
• Champion, role model, and embed Samsara’s cultural principles (Focus on customer success, build for the long-term, adopt a growth mindset, be inclusive, and win as a team) as we scale globally.

Minimum requirements for the role:

• Experience in a platform product role within a large software development organization
• Strong technical understanding, with an ability to grasp technical concepts & establish credibility with engineers.
• A proven track-record of delivering outstanding results for customers & the business, managing significant complexity and bold timelines. You also have a bias-to-action and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty.
• Demonstrated experience setting strategy for complex technical areas, and using analytics/data to measure progress toward goals and make investment choices.
• Experience hiring, developing, and leading people as a direct manager.
• Excellent communication skills. Must be comfortable presenting to customers and internal audiences, including senior executives.
• 10+ years of job experience, in relevant product, technical, and/or business roles.
• BS / MS degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience (i.e. software engineering experience).

An ideal candidate also has:

• Experience working in the telematics and/or automotive space.
• Experience working on software platforms supporting $1B+ in revenue.
• Technical familiarity with automotive communication protocols and vehicle onboard diagnostics systems.
• Experience managing firmware-based features.