Staff Software Engineer, Rust

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!

About The Team

The Hub Applications team builds core functionality of the software that runs on SmartThings hubs and keeps them connected to the cloud. Written primarily in Rust, our software is responsible for letting millions of connected homes reliably control their devices, stay in sync, and receive improvements over time. Some of our core responsibilities are:

• Local device execution: Building and maintaining the runtime that lets hubs run device integrations directly on the hub.
• Hub and cloud data flow: Ensuring device state, events, and commands move reliably between hubs and the cloud, that cloud and hub data records stay synchronized, and that hubs recover gracefully after losing connectivity.
• Core hub software architecture: Reshaping the hub’s core services so they’re easier to maintain, faster, and ready for new hardware..
• Configuration and system management: Designing how hubs receive, validate, and safely roll back configuration, and keeping core system behavior such as timekeeping consistent and resilient.
• Release quality and observability: Monitoring software releases across the hub population and building the metrics and tooling that surface problems early.

About The Role

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be a technical owner and leader for the Hub Applications team. This is a deeply hands-on role for someone with expert-level Rust skills. You’ll write, review, and set the standard for the Rust code that runs on millions of SmartThings hubs, where performance, memory use, and reliability on resource-constrained devices matter. Comfort with Rust’s ownership model, concurrency, and error handling is essential, as is experience working across the boundary between Rust and existing C code.

You’ll help drive long-term technical strategy for our core areas, including evolving the hub’s foundational software toward a more modular, maintainable design. Operating with autonomy, you’ll bring clarity to complex, cross-functional challenges and act as a go-to expert and point of contact for major initiatives. Close partnership with firmware, security, cloud, and product teams will shape how SmartThings hubs evolve. Mentoring engineers across the team, including senior engineers, and guiding how the team adopts AI-assisted development and operational practices are also part of the role.

This role is hybrid, 3 days/week in our Minneapolis Office (on iconic St Anthony Main across from Downtown, with paid attached parking!).

The pay range for this role is $139,000 to $198,000, with an annual bonus target of 20%.

Key Responsibilities

In this role, your primary responsibilities will include the following:

• Technical Strategy Ownership: Own the long-term technical direction for one or more Hub Applications domains.
• Lead Complex Initiatives: Lead large, cross-team projects as the technical owner, from design through rollout.
• Architect for Reliability & Scale: Guide architecture and design decisions for systems such as local device execution, hub-to-cloud data synchronization, and hub configuration and software asset management, with stability, resilience to unreliable connectivity, and operational excellence as first-class concerns.
• Rust Technical Leadership: Serve as a deep Rust expert for the team. Set the standard for how we write, review, and test Rust that runs on resource-constrained devices, with performance, memory efficiency, and safe concurrency as everyday concerns. Guide the evolution of existing code, including where Rust meets legacy C.
• AI Practices & Vision Collaboration: Help define how the team uses AI-assisted development and operational tooling, evaluating where AI can meaningfully improve velocity and quality, and set a forward-looking vision for responsible AI adoption in the organization.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with firmware, security, cloud infrastructure, and product management to keep technical direction aligned with product requirements and business needs.
• Mentor & Elevate the Team: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers at every level, including senior engineers, and help build engineering practices that raise the bar across the org.
• Operational Excellence & On-Call: Participate in observability, incident response, and on-call rotations supporting the production firmware delivery and hub connectivity.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

What You Bring On Day One (Required Qualifications)

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of production software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record operating at a Staff-level technical leadership capacity
• Expert-level proficiency in Rust, with deep knowledge of ownership and lifetimes, async and multithreaded concurrency, error handling, and writing performant, memory-efficient code for resource-constrained devices
• Strong systems programming experience on embedded Linux or similar constrained environments, including debugging crashes, memory issues, and performance problems in production
• Experience designing for unreliable networks: offline operation, state reconciliation, retry and backoff behavior, and graceful recovery
• Strong knowledge of AI development tools and practices
• Proven ability to lead architecture and design reviews, set technical direction across teams, and bring about simple solutions to complex problems
• Strong track record of cross-functional collaboration with firmware, cloud, and product teams
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience translating technical strategy for both technical and non-technical audiences

Desired Skills

• Experience interoperating Rust with C or C++ codebases, including incremental migration of legacy code
• Experience with IoT connectivity protocols and standards (Matter, Zigbee, Thread, MQTT)
• Experience with embedded scripting runtimes or sandboxed code execution (e.g. Lua, WebAssembly)
• Experience with IoT fleet management: staged rollouts, feature flags, monitoring, and lifecycle management at scale
• Experience with observability tooling and release monitoring for large deployed device populations
• Experience with CI/CD and automated validation for embedded software

SmartThings Benefits

Why You’ll Love Working at SmartThings

• 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.
• Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging is embedded into our culture and our work, and everyone has frequent opportunities to join forums and groups and participate in ongoing projects.
• We offer a parking stipend to cover the monthly garage cost. EV chargers are also onsite.
• In-office catered lunches once a week.
• Access to the onsite gym.

Base compensation range for this position is $139,000 to $198,000. 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 [email protected] and a member of our Talent Acquisition team will connect with you further!