Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

Engineering Manager, Release Engineering

Department: Cloud Platform Operations

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Minneapolis, MN

We’re Smart Things, 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 Smart Things to control and manage their connected life. Smart Things 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!

As the Release Engineering Manager for Samsung Smart Things, your customers aren’t the end‑users turning on smart lights. Your customers are the hundreds of internal developers building the Smart Things ecosystem.

Sitting within the Platform Engineering organization, your mission is to remove friction from the developer lifecycle. Smart Things 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.

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

• 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 Git Ops 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 Dev Ops 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 Smart Things 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.

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 Smart Things, we are dedicated to building a…