Personally, I'm surprised this took as long to happen as it did. I thought the advantages of hiring cyanogen were obvious to any Android OEM (or potential Android OEM) for quite some time now.
Reminds me highly of those halcyon days of game modding, where everyone was building awesome Q1 and Unreal mods and levels. And one by one, at first slowly, those authors got plucked up and pulled into industry. The whole modding notion has become a rarity because, well, why mod when you can work in the commercial space making games? Prove yourself out by writing some decent mod content, then get hired.
Not terribly surprising either given the back and forth between Samsung and the CM team up to this point. Earlier this year they sent Galaxy S IIs to some members of the CM team. (T-Mobile has also been impressive in this vain, with their tweets, open sourced code that is in GitHub and actually in CyanogenMod as well as their inclination towards devices that don't have locked bootloaders).
He's joining as a "Software Engineer". Given that this isn't Google, where such generic terms can mean anything and responsibility is flat, my guess is that he is just being employed as a warm body for the Samsung Android engineering team having demonstrated some ability to work on Android core code.
Therefore don't expect a monumental change in Samsung's Android software product or direction out of this.
Steve Kondik supposedly said that he will continue CyanogenMod as his side project and his employment to Samsung will not affect it. Now that he works with Samsung and as he also develops Cyanogenmod ROMs for many Samsung devices, wonder if there will be a conflict of interest.
I personally hope the CM team keeps the Cyanogenmod project alive.
Considering that Samsung seems to like CyanogenMod sending them devices and all that, I wouldn't think it's impossible he'll be able to contribute to CM on company hours.
