Sr Staff Software Engineer

Sr Staff Software Engineer

Department: Interfaces

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Reporting To: Inwoo Kim

Description

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.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Inclusive Hiring Practices

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 SmartThings, we are dedicated to building an 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)

• 10+ years of relevant experience, with at least 2-3 years in a providing technical leadership across multiple related teams.

• Bachelor''s Degree Required

• Interoperability & Integration Standards: * 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).

• AI Productivity Mastery:

• 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.

• Model Context Protocol (MCP): 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.

• Distributed Systems Mastery: Advanced understanding of CAP theorem, distributed locking, and eventual consistency in high-concurrency IoT environments.

• Cloud Ecosystems: Deep hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, specifically regarding Serverless, Container Orchestration (K8s), and Global Traffic Management.

• The Sr. Staff Mindset: 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.

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 $165,000 to $235,000 annually. 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.

At SmartThings, 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. Please reach out to talent@smartthings.com and a member of our Talent Acquisition team will connect with you further!