Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

SmartThings • Minneapolis, MN

9h • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Proven experience treating internal developers as a customer base (e.g., conducting internal surveys, managing a platform feature backlog).
• Deep expertise with containerization, Kubernetes (EKS), EC2, lambda, and AWS infrastructure.
• Advanced proficiency with declarative GitOps tools (e.g., ArgoCD) and continuous delivery systems.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

• Define the roadmap for our deployment internal developer platform (IDP). Gather feedback, and build features that solve real developer pain points.
• Build smart guardrails and abstractions around AWS, Kubernetes, and GitOps workflows so developers can focus on writing business logic, not wrestling with deployment manifests.
• Partner with cloud platform to ensure the release platform accommodates varied workflows while maintaining unified compliance and security standards.
• 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.
• Establish clear, shared release standards and "Golden Paths" that empower decentralized, global engineering teams to deploy independently without risking ecosystem stability.
• 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.
• Partner with engineering leads across SmartThings to champion progressive delivery (canary deployments, feature flagging, automated rollbacks) as standard developer practices.
• Own the documentation, golden paths, and onboarding experiences that ensure a new developer can safely deploy code on day one.
• 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.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and mental health
• HSA with employer contribution
• Life & disability insurance
• FSAs for health and dependent care expenses
• Competitive 401k with a 5% employer match
• Unlimited PTO
• 12 paid holidays
• Generous parental leave policy (8 weeks fully paid parental leave and 8 more fully paid weeks for childbirth recovery leave)
• Education reimbursement program
• Access to learning resources through O’Reilly
• Parking stipend
• EV chargers onsite
• In-office catered lunches on Thursdays
• Access to the onsite gym

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager