Staff Software Engineer
$144,250–$169,127 year
HybridBoston, Massachusetts, United States
Job Summary
Own technical direction for complex, cross-cutting initiatives spanning device APIs, event pipelines, lifecycle management, and partner-facing platform capabilities. Lead architectural design for medium-to-large initiatives, producing high-quality design documents that capture tradeoffs and long-term implications. Define and evolve shared platform patterns, API contracts, and event schemas 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. Build frameworks, libraries, and components that are reusable across the team or department, ensuring they are actually adopted and used by other engineers. Make engineers around you noticeably more effective through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and direct coaching on architectural thinking. Drive technical alignment across teams that share platform dependencies, surfacing conflicts early and proposing resolutions. Establish and uphold high standards for production readiness, observability, and reliability across the systems you own and influence. Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and durable improvements that follow. Use AI-assisted development tools as a consistent part of your engineering workflow while maintaining full architectural control and review discipline.
Required Qualifications
- 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
Desired Qualifications
- 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
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