Staff Software Engineer

Alarm.com•Boston, MA

1d•$144,250 - $169,127•Hybrid

About The Position

Alarm.com provides the leading cloud platform for smart security and IoT, powering millions of home and business experiences. Our systems integrate devices, cloud services, APIs, and event-driven workflows into a unified ecosystem used by internal teams and external partners around the world. This role sits at the intersection of two strategically important areas of Alarm.com's engineering organization: Strategic Partner eXcellence (SPX) Dev And ice Platform. SPX establishes the partner enablement function for Alarm.com's highest-value PaaS integrations. The team architects and maintains the Core Partner Platform — shared edge services, event pipelines, authentication infrastructure, and integration patterns — that allow strategic partners to build reliably ontop of Alarm.com's stack. SPX acts as the primary delivery owner for Tier 1 partnerships, drives cross-team alignment, and codifies reusable patterns that enable feature teams to self-serve future integrations. Device Platform builds and evolves the foundational shared capabilities that underpin Alarm.com's connected device ecosystem. This spans the full arc of how devices are modeled, integrated, and managed on the platform — from the APIs and event pipelines that expose device state and commands, to the lifecycle management flows that govern how devices are provisioned and maintained, to the transport and protocol infrastructure that connects physical devices to the platform at scale. The team is on a deliberate path toward cleaner domain ownership, API-first design, and independently deployable services — a modernization effort that unlocks scalability and consistency for a growing landscape of internal teams and external partners. These two areas are deeply connected. The partner-facing platform depends on the device platform being reliable, well-bounded, and evolvable. The device platform's modernization directly enables the scalability and consistency that strategic partners require. A Staff Engineer in this space operates across both — shaping the technical foundations that teams across the organization build on. The team is led by an Engineering Manager and supported by a senior Architect. The Staff SE hired into this role will work in close partnership with the Architect and the broader engineering organization as a peer technical leader and force multiplier. We are hiring a to serve as a technical multiplier across the SPX and Device Platform domains. Staff Software Engineer At Alarm.com, the Staff SE carries a distinct mandate: to make the engineers and systems around them measurably better. This is not primarily a project execution role. The Staff SE owns technically complex, high-visibility initiatives end-to-end, shapes architectural direction across domain boundaries, builds reusable frameworks and patterns that other teams depend on, and helps the organization move faster with more consistency and less rework. Projects spearheaded by a Staff SE carry feature-team-level scope — visible work spanning the organization, often requiring cross-team collaboration and sustained technical leadership. The Staff SE anticipates medium-term technical problems 12+ months out and works proactively to prevent them from becoming delivery or reliability issues. They are active participants in engineering leadership initiatives — tech councils, working groups, cross-team design forums — not passive consumers of information. Success in this role requires deep technical judgment in backend and platform engineering, the ability to operate across ambiguity and cross-team dependencies, and the credibility to influence technical direction alongside architects, engineering managers, and senior engineers across the department. This is a hands-on role — the Staff SE writes code, leads designs, and drives delivery — but their highest-leverage contribution is the clarity, reusability, and quality they bring to systems and teams beyond their immediate scope.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
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 — influencing direction without 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.

Nice To Haves

Strong experience with .NET/C# and SQL Server; this is the foundation of Alarm.com's backend stack, though equivalent depth in similar ecosystems may translate well.
Experience building or evolving partner-facing APIs, external integration platforms, or shared internal platform capabilities consumed by multiple teams.
Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar event streaming infrastructure — including schema design, consumer patterns, and operational considerations at scale.
Experience with device-oriented systems, IoT platforms, device lifecycle management, or integration-heavy backend architectures — including transport protocols, device provisioning flows, and the challenges of connecting physical hardware to cloud platforms at scale.
Experience with microservice or domain-aligned architecture patterns, including domain analysis, service boundary definition, and incremental migration from monolithic systems.
Experience with observability practices, incident management, and production operations at scale — including defining monitoring frameworks and support models for externally consumed systems.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) in a structured, disciplined workflow — including multi-file refactors, spec-driven development, and test-driven AI usage.
Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or other patterns for integrating AI agents with REST APIs and platform services.
Experience contributing to or leading department-wide technical standards, architecture decision records, or engineering working groups.

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 — not just the chosen approach.
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.
Build and evolve partner-facing platform components within SPX's Core Partner Platform: outbound command services, inbound event pipelines, authentication and authorization infrastructure, and integration patterns that scale across multiple partners.
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 — and that are actually adopted and used by other engineers. The success of this work is judged on the size of problem solved and whether it genuinely reduces duplicated effort and accelerates delivery.
Make engineers around you noticeably more effective — through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and direct coaching on architectural thinking and engineering craft.
Help engineers at all levels frame problems well, constrain scope appropriately, and develop sound technical judgment — not just deliver features.
Serve as a trusted technical resource for engineers across SPX, Device Platform, and teams around the organization who build on or depend on shared platform capabilities.
Drive technical alignment across teams that share platform dependencies — surfacing conflicts early, proposing resolutions, and ensuring shared systems evolve in a coherent direction.
Partner with the team's Architect on domain-level technical direction, contributing meaningfully to architectural decisions rather than passively consuming them.
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 — for drafting, debugging, refactoring, test generation, and documentation — while maintaining full architectural control and review discipline.
Model rigorous validation practices for AI-generated output: review for correctness, edge cases, security implications, and long-term maintainability before anything reaches production.
Help teammates adopt AI tools effectively — sharing workflows, prompting patterns, and validation approaches that raise the team's collective fluency without lowering engineering standards.