Samsara’s summer internship program offers students an unparalleled opportunity to learn and grow in a high-performing environment. Interns work directly on Samsara products, processes, and customer experience, making real-world contributions that benefit our customers in physical operations. Each intern is paired with a dedicated mentor and manager for guidance and feedback, ensuring their success and professional development. The program includes events that allow interns to connect with leadership, learn from industry experts, and enhance their skills through comprehensive training sessions. This hands-on experience provides both the opportunity to hone their skills as they prepare for a career in tech and to create real-world impact for our customers through their intern projects.

From tool enhancements to new product features, interns are developing their skills while up-leveling products that increase road safety, reduce CO2 emissions, and streamline operations. For International Intern Day, we are highlighting a few of our summer interns and their impact at Samsara:

Innovative solutions from our 2024 interns.

Please describe the focus of your intern project.

Currently, our Training product enables fleet drivers to view and complete their assigned training via the Samsara Driver App. Some of our customers don't use the Driver App, and completing trainings on a small mobile screen can be cumbersome. My project is to build on this experience and make training courses accessible on our Driver Portal, which can be accessed from any device, including desktop computers, which some customers already use in their training programs. This will also give drivers the ability to monitor their assignment progress by seeing courses that may require revision and their associated due dates, as well as courses that have been finished and their scores.

By providing drivers with a user-friendly platform that allows them to view their courses from most devices, they will be more motivated to complete their training, gain new knowledge, and be engaged with our tools. Not only will our customers be able to reduce fuel and insurance costs, they will have better-trained and safer drivers.

What insight have you gained during your time here?

Before I joined Samsara, I knew very little about the world of physical operations. Something that stuck out to me is that there is such a high demand for technology and there are still so many areas of the industry that can benefit from it. I was surprised by the high level of collaboration across Samsara’s R&D team that goes into successfully delivering a product to customers. It is impressive to see how much goes on behind the scenes to ship a high-quality product that customers can begin using immediately.

Please describe the focus of your intern project.

My internship project is focused on GPS spoofing/testing feature. Currently, the testing routing feature is constrained by the need for manual spoofing and physical VG (Virtual Gateways). This process is time-consuming and relying on physical VGs hinders the testing scalability. Another constraint is that the existing method simulates movements by generating location updates in straight lines between points, which does not reflect real driving conditions. I aim to enhance our team’s testing capabilities for complex routing features by adding a feature to our application that supports continuous simulation of complex trips in real time.

Improved testing efficiency reduces the need for manual testing and speeds up the development process. More complex and realistic route simulations lead to better detection of issues, resulting in a more reliable product. 

What experiences or resources at Samsara have been instrumental in your professional development this summer?

My internship at Samsara so far has been an incredible learning journey, thanks to the people I’ve met here. I am constantly learning something new working with my team. There is a great mix of skills and everybody is super supportive and willing to share their knowledge, especially my mentor and buddy who have provided constant help from day one. 

Please describe the focus of your intern project.

For my intern project, I am enhancing our Alerts feature, which is a crucial tool that reports driving safety events to fleet operators such as speeding, mobile usage, and crashes. Currently, there is limited immediate visibility for urgent events like crashes, which require immediate attention from safety administrators to ensure driver safety. My project aims to implement a pop-up notification that instantly alerts the safety administrators of critical events, such as crashes or distracted driving.

This tool enhancement is designed to significantly improve the response times of safety administrators, allowing for immediate action to urgent driver events—potentially saving lives and preventing undeserved jail time for drivers. Additionally, enhancing our safety alerts will benefit not just our customers, but also the communities our customers serve, as improving driver safety contributes to safer roads for everyone.

Can you describe your approach to this project? What obstacles did you face, and how did you overcome them?

One of my teammates once told me, “if you ran into no obstacles, I would be concerned.” Throughout this project, I have encountered several challenges, from unexpectedly steep learning curves to small oversights in the framework that cost me days. Through a combination of Slack threads, Confluence resources, and support from my teammates, I have found solutions to these roadblocks. My manager has been invaluable, guiding me to anticipate risks and prioritize more challenging tasks, ensuring the project remains on track during critical phases. 

My team and especially my mentor have been hugely helpful in developing a deep knowledge of Samsara’s technology and instilling best practices early on, which will undoubtedly stay with me throughout my software engineering career and beyond. My advice to future interns is to absorb as much knowledge as possible from those around you. There is something to be learned from everyone at Samsara, and you never know what you can learn by just starting a simple conversation. 

Please describe the focus of your intern project.

For my intern project this summer, I am gathering and analyzing internal data from all the tools that the Mid Market Public Sector Account Development team uses (including Gong, Salesforce, and Salesloft) to understand what behaviors and practices are found in high-performing Account Development Representative/Account Executive partnerships that lead to successful selling strategies. 

Some of the data I’m looking into is outreach effectiveness (number of emails sent, personalization, open rates, reply rates, number of phone calls made, talk ratio on phone calls, and more) as well as average deal sizes per ADR, number of trials generated, and how they structure calls with their Account Executives. Using these insights, I’m uncovering trends of high-performing ADRs who most effectively generate pipeline and set up the most customer trials. As a result, we can use the findings to train and coach ADR’s to better sell to our customers and increase the pipeline sourced for Mid Market Public Sector as a whole.

What experiences or resources at Samsara have been instrumental in your professional development this summer?

Every person I have met at Samsara has helped me grow professionally this summer at Samsara. I have learned from numerous ADR’s, managers, my recruiter, Account Executives, and more across the company. Not only have I learned more about Samsara’s solutions and how they support our customers’ operations, but I’ve been able to grow in my Sales skills—leveraging new tools like Salesforce and Gong and honing my skills in inbound and outbound sales.

Please describe the focus of your intern project.

Currently, clients can click on a trip on their dashboard and see a Speeding Report that shows where and when a vehicle was speeding. Yet, there’s no way to view this data over multiple trips. Providing that level of insight would help our customers have a better understanding of their operations and improve driver safety.

My project will allow customers to export detailed information about speeding incidents into a spreadsheet. They can then run custom data analysis to see where speeding occurs most often. This enables safety managers to better understand speeding patterns and be more prepared for coaching conversations.

What insight have you gained during your time here?

I’ve always wanted to learn more about Internet of Things, not only the technical aspects but also the real impact it has on our world. What better place to do so than at Samsara? Whether it’s probing the latest technologies with other Samsarians or learning more about the future of IoT at Samsara Beyond, I love that our work is helping to power the world we live in.

Join us and launch your career.

By September, Samsara’s Emerging Talent team will begin to hire for our 2025 intern class—we are looking for curious and creative minds to join us in building transformational solutions for the industries that power the world’s physical operations. Check out our early career opportunities and follow us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on Samsara.