Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

Department: Cloud Platform Operations

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Description

As the Release Engineering Manager for Samsung SmartThings, your customers aren't the end-users turning on smart lights. Your customers are the hundreds of internal developers building the SmartThings ecosystem.

Sitting within the Platform Engineering organization, your mission is to remove friction from the developer lifecycle. SmartThings operates at a massive global scale, and we need a leader who views the deployment pipeline not as a series of bureaucratic gates, but as a high-performance internal product. You will lead a team of engineers dedicated to building self-service delivery platforms that empower developers to ship code to millions of devices safely, autonomously, and with the goal of reducing cognitive overload.

Because our engineering footprint spans continents, you will act as a critical bridge, collaborating closely with global stakeholders to align release standards across diverse, distributed teams.

Key Responsibilities

This position is a hybrid role, based onsite 3 days a week at our office in Minneapolis, MN.

In this role, your primary responsibilities will include the following:

• Treat Release as a Product: Define the roadmap for our deployment internal developer platform (IDP). Gather feedback, and build features that solve real developer pain points.
• Abstract Infrastructure Complexity: Build smart guardrails and abstractions around AWS, Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows so developers can focus on writing business logic, not wrestling with deployment manifests.

• Cross-Functional Partnerships: Partner with cloud platform to ensure the release platform accommodates varied workflows while maintaining unified compliance and security standards.
• Bridge Distributed Engineering Hubs: Act as a key collaborator and liaison with global Samsung engineering teams (including teams in South Korea and other international hubs). Navigate varying time zones and technical cultures to drive alignment on release strategies and platform adoption.
• Federated Governance: Establish clear, shared release standards and "Golden Paths" that empower decentralized, global engineering teams to deploy independently without risking ecosystem stability.

• Lead a Developer-Centric Team: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of Release and DevOps engineers, focusing on automation and developer empowerment. Cross-train existing siloed knowledge, and grow the capabilities of team-members.
• Utilize AI-tooling to accelerate the internal developer platform.
• Evangelize Modern Release Paradigms: Partner with engineering leads across SmartThings to champion progressive delivery (canary deployments, feature flagging, automated rollbacks) as standard developer practices.
• Onboarding & Documentation: Own the documentation, golden paths, and onboarding experiences that ensure a new developer can safely deploy code on day one.

• Automate the Blast Radius: Build automated smoke testing, canary analysis, and instant rollback mechanisms into the pipeline so developers can fail fast and recover faster without breaking the smart home network.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Inclusive Hiring Practices

Don't meet all desired requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single desired qualification. At SmartThings, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

What You Bring On Day One (Required Qualifications)

• Experience: 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Release Engineering, with 2+ years managing engineering teams in a platform-centric or developer-tools environment.
• Bachelor's Degree in relevant field.
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Proven experience treating internal developers as a customer base (e.g., conducting internal surveys, managing a platform feature backlog).
• The Cloud Native Stack: Deep expertise with containerization, Kubernetes (EKS), EC2, lambda, and AWS infrastructure.
• GitOps & Continuous Delivery: Advanced proficiency with declarative GitOps tools (e.g., ArgoCD) and continuous delivery systems.

Desired Skills

• Compliance Frameworks: Experience with common security and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, or HIPAA.
• Infrastructure as Code: Strong hands-on experience with Terraform
• Developer Experience (DevEx) Passion: Prior experience working specifically on Developer Experience or Internal Developer Platform (IDP) teams.
• High-Scale IoT/Microservices: Experience optimizing release velocity for massive, highly distributed microservice architectures where dependencies are complex.
• Observability: Familiarity with giving developers visibility into their own deployments via Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana alerts.

SmartThings Benefits

• We offer an attractive compensation package with comprehensive health benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and mental health; an HSA with employer contribution; life & disability insurance; FSAs for health and dependent care expenses; a competitive 401k with a 5% employer match, and more.
• All of our employees enjoy unlimited PTO, 12 paid holidays, and a generous parental leave policy (8 weeks fully paid parental leave and 8 more fully paid weeks for childbirth recovery leave).
• Eligible employees benefit from our education reimbursement program, and all employees enjoy access to learning resources through O'Reilly.
• Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging is embedded into our culture and our work, and everyone has frequent opportunities to join forums and groups and participate in ongoing projects.
• We offer a parking stipend to cover the monthly garage cost. EV chargers are also onsite.
• In-office catered lunches on Thursdays.
• Access to the onsite gym.

Base compensation range for this position is $146,000 to $198,000 annually. Actual base within this range will depend on many factors including experience, skills, technical expertise and market alignment. In addition, this role is eligible for a 20% annual target bonus based heavily on individual performance.