It’s been a busy time here as we’ve been working to deliver on the commitments we’ve made to scale and improve SmartThings. As I outlined in my earlier post, we’ve been driving some big changes that will help us bring everything to the next level for you.
One of those changes (and one that I’m particularly pleased to announce) is the hiring of Robert Parker as our new SVP of Engineering. Before joining us, Robert was a director of engineering at Amazon, where he worked on some of our favorite products. On the platform side, Robert spent 2 years building and contributing to the high scale platforms Amazon is known for such as AWS, the largest cloud infrastructure service in the world. In terms of consumer products, Robert was a leader around some of our favorites including Prime Music and Alexa, and the devices where these experiences come together. And that’s after spending 18 years at Microsoft.
In short, you should rest assured that Robert knows how to build and operate reliable services at scale. Many of the recent improvements that you’ve seen already in the last few weeks were driven by him, and we’ll continue to work on this together.
For more on Robert’s background and what he and I see as next steps both for SmartThings and the smart home industry as a whole, I hope you’ll check out this article on The Verge. If you’re in the Bay Area this week, I invite you to join us at the Samsung Developer Conference, where you’ll be able to meet Robert in person. If you can’t make it to SDC, don’t worry, he’ll be joining next week’s developer call.
I’m thrilled to have Robert on the team, and I know he’s the right person to lead the next phase of development of SmartThings.
-Alex