Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

Overview

We’re Smart Things, one of the leading IoT ecosystems in the world, creating the most effortless way for anyone to build a smart home. We’re a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung with corporate offices in Minneapolis and the Bay Area. As the Release Engineering Manager, you will serve internal developers who build the Smart Things ecosystem, removing friction from the developer lifecycle and leading a team that delivers a high‑performance internal product.

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

• Developer Platform & Product Ownership – Treat the release platform as a product: define its roadmap, gather feedback, and build features that solve real developer pain points.
• Abstract Infrastructure Complexity – Build smart guardrails and abstractions around AWS, Kubernetes, and Git Ops workflows so developers can focus on writing business logic.
• Global Collaboration & Stakeholder Alignment – Partner with cloud platform teams and global Samsung engineering hubs to align release standards and governance across continents.
• Team Leadership & Culture Shift – Mentor a developer‑centric team of Release and Dev Ops engineers, integrate AI tooling, evangelize modern release paradigms, and own onboarding documentation.
• Metrics & Reliability – Automate blast‑radius mitigation with smoke testing, canary analysis, and instant rollback mechanisms.

• 5+ years in Dev Ops, SRE, or Release Engineering, with 2+ years managing engineering teams in a platform‑centric or developer‑tools environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
• Customer‑centric mindset: proven experience treating internal developers as a customer base and managing a platform feature backlog.
• Deep expertise with containerization, Kubernetes (EKS), EC2, Lambda, and AWS infrastructure.
• Advanced proficiency with declarative Git Ops tools (e.g., ArgoCD) and continuous delivery systems.

• Experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, or HIPAA compliance frameworks.
• Strong hands‑on experience with Terraform.
• Prior experience on Developer Experience or Internal Developer Platform (IDP) teams.
• Experience optimizing release velocity for large, highly distributed microservice architectures.
• Familiarity with giving developers visibility into deployments via Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana.

• Competitive compensation with a base range of $146,000 to $198,000, plus a 20% annual target bonus.
• Comprehensive health benefits: medical, dental, vision, mental health, HSA contribution, life & disability insurance, FSAs.
• Unlimited PTO, 12 paid holidays, generous parental leave (8 fully paid weeks plus 8 more for recovery).
• Education reimbursement, access to O’Reilly learning resources, and career development opportunities.
• Commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging with frequent forums and groups.
• Parking stipend, onsite EV chargers, catered lunches on Thursdays, onsite gym access.

At Smart Things, we are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment for all. If you require accommodations to participate in our hiring process or to perform the requirements of the job, we will work with you to meet your needs in compliance with applicable laws.