Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Alarm.com provides the leading cloud platform for smart security and IoT, integrating devices, cloud services, APIs, and event-driven workflows into a unified ecosystem used by internal teams and external partners worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for complex, cross-cutting initiatives spanning device APIs and event pipelines, device lifecycle management, device transport and protocol infrastructure, and partner-facing platform capabilities.
• Lead architectural design for medium-to-large initiatives, producing high-quality design documents that capture tradeoffs, constraints, and long-term implications.
• Define and evolve shared platform patterns, API contracts, and event schemas that are used by multiple teams across the department.
• Anticipate medium-term architectural risks—12+ months out—and work proactively to prevent them from negatively impacting the team or the platform.
• Contribute to and influence department-wide technical standards, modernization guidance, and platform conventions—participating in tech councils, working groups, and cross-team design reviews as an active contributor, not a passive observer.
• Lead delivery of foundational platform capabilities across the device ecosystem: device state and command APIs, device lifecycle management, event-driven pipelines, and the transport and protocol infrastructure that connects physical devices to the platform.
• Drive end-to-end delivery of large, multi-engineer initiatives with a high degree of autonomy—from technical design through implementation, validation, and production readiness.
• Ensure systems you build and influence are observable, supportable, and operationally sound from day one—not as an afterthought.
• Build frameworks, libraries, and components that are reusable across the team or department—judged on the size of the problem solved and whether it genuinely reduces duplicated effort and accelerates delivery.
• Help engineers at all levels frame problems well, constrain scope appropriately, and develop sound technical judgment—not just deliver features.
• Represent the team's technical interests in cross-team forums, dependency discussions, and platform planning conversations.
• Translate architectural vision into executable plans that delivery teams can act on—bridging the gap between long-term platform direction and near-term delivery reality.
• Establish and uphold high standards for production readiness, observability, and reliability across the systems you own and influence.
• Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and the durable improvements that follow—treating operational quality as a first-class engineering concern.
• Help define and operationalize SLAs, monitoring frameworks, and support models for partner-facing and shared platform services.
• Use AI-assisted development tools as a consistent part of your engineering workflow—reviewing AI-generated output for correctness, edge cases, security implications, and long-term maintainability before anything reaches production.
• Model rigorous validation practices for AI-generated output.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering
10+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of operating at Staff-level scope and impact.
Proven experience leading large, multi-engineer technical initiatives end-to-end— from architecture through delivery—with a high degree of autonomy and accountability for outcomes.
Demonstrated ability to define and evolve reusable platform patterns, shared libraries, or integration frameworks that are actually adopted and used by other engineers—not just built.
Strong architectural judgment: ability to reason about service boundaries, domain ownership, failure modes, versioning, and long-term maintainability—not just immediate implementation choices.
Deep proficiency in backend platform engineering: RESTful and/or gRPC APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures (Kafka or equivalent), and shared platform design.
Experience operating in environments moving from tightly coupled systems toward domain-aligned, independently deployable services.
Demonstrated ability to anticipate medium-term technical problems and drive toward solutions proactively—not just respond to issues as they surface.
Active participation in engineering leadership initiatives—tech councils, working groups, cross-team design reviews—with a track record of influencing other experienced engineers, not just consuming information.
Credibility working alongside architects and engineering managers on technically complex, cross-team initiatives—not needing to be the final decision-maker.
Clear, positive buy-in toward AI-assisted development as an expected part of modern engineering work; this is not optional for this role.
Practical familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows—including the ability to use AI effectively for implementation, debugging, and documentation while maintaining validation rigor and architectural discipline.