Sr Staff Software Engineer

SmartThings•Minneapolis, MN

13h•$165,000 - $235,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We’re SmartThings , one of the leading IoT ecosystems in the world, creating the most effortless way for anyone to create a smart home. We're a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung with corporate offices in Minneapolis and the Bay Area. More than 430 million people worldwide use SmartThings to control and manage their connected life. SmartThings delivers simple, powerful experiences across Samsung’s leading portfolio of phones, TVs, and appliances. We also offer the most versatile smart home experience as an open platform with a rich partner ecosystem (think IKEA, SONOS, Honeywell, and so many more). As a founding member of Matter, we are a leader in the industry to help make smart homes more secure, reliable and seamless to use. Come be a part of the leading edge of IoT innovation! At SmartThings, we are creating the seamless, intelligent home experience of the future. Our platform acts as a key point of integration for our global IoT ecosystem, processing billions of events daily. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you are a technical force multiplier. You drive technical excellence across the cloud organization, ensuring our cloud architecture is resilient, AI-augmented, and serves as a high-performance bridge for cross-ecosystem interoperability. Key Responsibilities This position is a hybrid role, based onsite 3 days a week at our office in Minneapolis, MN. Technical Strategy & Architecture: Collaborate with leadership to align the 2-3 year technical roadmap for cloud infrastructure. Evaluate "Build vs. Buy" scenarios for core platform components to ensure we maintain a competitive advantage in the AI/IoT space. Ecosystem Interoperability: Lead the evolution of the SmartThings Schema and Cloud-to-Cloud (C2C) integration layers. Ensure that our interfaces with external ecosystems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home, Matter-over-Bridge) are low-latency, secure, and highly scalable. AI Productivity Governance: Standardize the implementation for "AI-Augmented Engineering." Guide how the organization uses LLM-based coding assistants and automated agentic workflows to compress the SDLC without compromising security or architectural integrity. Intelligent Infrastructure: Drive the adoption of Model Context Protocol (MCP) to bridge the gap between our cloud data silos and AI agents. Ensure that our internal tools and documentation are optimized to empower autonomous debugging and discovery. Systemic Resilience & Anti-Fragility: Serve as the guardian of the system's blast radius. Implement Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error Budgets that balance the pace of innovation with high-availability requirements. Security & Compliance Governance: Partner with Security teams to embed Zero Trust and Secure-by-Design principles. Ensure the platform meets global privacy standards (GDPR, CCPA) without sacrificing developer velocity. The RFC Culture: Champion the technical review process. Provide rigorous, ego-free feedback on high-impact designs, specifically evaluating how new services will interact with the broader AI-agent ecosystem and partner cloud integrations.

Requirements

10+ years of relevant experience, with at least 2-3 years in a providing technical leadership across multiple related teams.
Bachelor's Degree Required
Deep proficiency in OAuth2, JWT, and Webhooks as they relate to secure partner authentication and event-driven architectures.
Proven experience designing and scaling Cloud-to-Cloud (C2C) connectors and public-facing APIs.
Understanding of the requirements for third-party ecosystem integration (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit/Matter).
Proficiency in leveraging AI-native development environments (e.g., Cursor, Claude, or GitHub Copilot) to achieve significant velocity gains on complex refactoring and architectural tasks.
Ability to coach engineers on Prompt Engineering for Engineers—moving from simple chat to complex agentic workflows.
Knowledge of MCP to facilitate seamless communication between AI models and local or remote data sources, ensuring agents have the necessary context to assist in system maintenance.
Advanced understanding of CAP theorem, distributed locking, and eventual consistency in high-concurrency IoT environments.
Deep hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, specifically regarding Serverless, Container Orchestration (K8s), and Global Traffic Management.
Ability to discern between "AI Hype" and genuine architectural value.
Experience managing Technical Debt, knowing when to automate legacy cleanup using AI.
Exceptional ability to distill complex technical designs into a concise executive summary.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with leadership to align the 2-3 year technical roadmap for cloud infrastructure.
Evaluate "Build vs. Buy" scenarios for core platform components to ensure we maintain a competitive advantage in the AI/IoT space.
Lead the evolution of the SmartThings Schema and Cloud-to-Cloud (C2C) integration layers.
Ensure that our interfaces with external ecosystems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home, Matter-over-Bridge) are low-latency, secure, and highly scalable.
Standardize the implementation for "AI-Augmented Engineering."
Guide how the organization uses LLM-based coding assistants and automated agentic workflows to compress the SDLC without compromising security or architectural integrity.
Drive the adoption of Model Context Protocol (MCP) to bridge the gap between our cloud data silos and AI agents.
Ensure that our internal tools and documentation are optimized to empower autonomous debugging and discovery.
Serve as the guardian of the system's blast radius.
Implement Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error Budgets that balance the pace of innovation with high-availability requirements.
Partner with Security teams to embed Zero Trust and Secure-by-Design principles.
Ensure the platform meets global privacy standards (GDPR, CCPA) without sacrificing developer velocity.
Champion the technical review process.
Provide rigorous, ego-free feedback on high-impact designs, specifically evaluating how new services will interact with the broader AI-agent ecosystem and partner cloud integrations.

Benefits

attractive compensation package with 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 to cover the monthly garage cost
EV chargers are also onsite
in-office catered lunches on Thursdays
access to the onsite gym