Software Engineering Manager - Alarms

Verkada; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Verkada is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Alarms team. You will own the system that analyzes incidents after an alarm fires, coordinating AI-driven automation with human judgment to protect people and spaces at scale.

You will define autonomous actions, manage the real-time workflow engine, and partner with product and operators to extend the alarm response across Verkada’s platform. Candidates should bring 8+ years in software and 2+ years leading teams.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to lead and scale engineering teams.
• Experience building scalable, reliable distributed systems.
• Experience with real-time or high-availability systems.
• Collaborates closely with product management to drive outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Define where AI acts autonomously and where a human decides, with product and monitoring ops.
• Own the real-time workflow engine and the vision-language SOP adaptation pipeline.
• Set and maintain a reliability bar for a system with no acceptable quiet failure mode.
• Hire and grow the team.
• Partner with the PM on the roadmap and with operators who use monitoring tools daily.
• Collaborate across product teams to extend the response layer into Verkada platform.

Skills

Team leadership

Distributed systems

Real-time systems

Product collaboration

Job description

Who We Are

Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.

Who We Are

Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.
We’ve got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation, more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and Verkada is at the center of it.
You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform’s impact in the world. It's the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that’s alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes. We’re rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

About The Role

The Alarms team builds the response layer: the software that decides what happens in the minutes after an alarm fires. It uses real-time video, audio, and sensor data to analyze incidents, filter false alarms, and coordinate verifiable action.
This platform serves as the central intelligence for our alarm product, seamlessly combining AI-driven automation with human judgment to protect people and spaces at scale.
As an Engineering Manager, you will own this system across three surfaces: the customer incident experience, the monitoring software our human operators use to handle alarms at scale, and the integrations that carry an incident out to emergency dispatch.

What You’ll Do

• Define where AI acts autonomously and where a human decides, in partnership with the product and our monitoring operations team.
• Own the real-time workflow engine that models response actions after an alarm is triggered, and the vision‑language pipeline that adapts SOPs mid‑incident.
• Set and hold the reliability bar for a system with no acceptable quiet failure mode.
• Hire and grow the team
• Partner with the PM on the roadmap, and with the operators who use the monitoring tools daily.
• Work across product teams to extend the response layer into the rest of the Verkada platform.

What You Bring

• 2+ years leading, mentoring, and scaling engineering teams.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience building scalable, reliable distributed systems.
• Experience with real-time or high-availability systems where latency and uptime carry consequences.
• A track record of driving product outcomes through close collaboration with product management.

Nice to Have

• Experience architecting