Staff Software Engineer, CloudDepartment: Interfaces
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Reporting To: Deepti Gaonkar
DescriptionAs a Staff Engineer on the Cloud-to-Cloud (C2C) team, you will be the architectural backbone of how SmartThings interacts with the global IoT ecosystem. You will lead the evolution of the SmartThings Schema, ensuring that our integrations-from voice assistants to third-party smart home devices-are seamless, secure, and hyper-scalable. This isn't just about making things work; it's about defining how they work at a massive scale.
Key ResponsibilitiesThis 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:
- Lead the design and long-term evolution of the C2C platform. You'll ensure the SmartThings Schema remains flexible enough for tomorrow's devices while maintaining the rock-solid stability required for today's users.
- Act as the subject matter expert for our AWS infrastructure. You will leverage deep hands-on experience to build systems that aren't just "in the cloud," but are truly cloud-native, prioritizing elastic scalability and zero-trust security.
- Provide leadership through design reviews and mentorship. You will set the standard for AI-assisted engineering best practices, ensuring that AI-generated code meets our rigorous security, privacy, and performance benchmarks.
- Take ownership of the developer experience by integrating agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot Agents) into the team's daily workflow. Your goal is to move the team from "manual coding" to "architectural orchestration," significantly improving speed of delivery.
- Take end-to-end ownership of the technical stack. You will identify bottlenecks in our delivery pipeline and implement strategies to improve developer productivity, CI/CD speed, and overall engineering effectiveness. Use AI to automate the "boring" parts of the job-from generating unit tests and documentation to triaging complex incident logs across our C2C distributed systems.
Skills, Knowledge & ExpertiseInclusive Hiring PracticesDon'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)- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a significant portion dedicated to distributed systems and high-traffic cloud environments.
- Deep proficiency in AWS services like Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB, and API Gateway. You should be intimately familiar with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
- You understand the nuances of building public-facing schemas and APIs that are intuitive for third-party developers yet robust enough for enterprise partners.
- You have a proven track record of leading cross-team initiatives. You know how to influence without authority and can translate complex technical trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders. You also provide regular mentorship to grow the technical expertise of engineers on and off your immediate team.
- You don't treat security as a checkbox at the end of a sprint; it's baked into your initial designs.
Desired Skills- Direct experience with IoT protocols (Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave) or ecosystem integrations (Google Home, Alexa, Apple HomeKit).
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, including deploying and operating highly available, scalable containerized applications in a production environment, and deep knowledge of managing cluster resources, scaling strategies, and leveraging cloud-native tooling for operational excellence.
- Experience contributing to open-source projects or industry standards.
- A passion for automating everything-from infrastructure (Terraform/CDK) to testing.
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.
- 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 $139,000 to $198,000. 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.
