Staff Platform Engineer — SDA Architecture Leader

Alarm; Tysons, Northern (VA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical plans

Health Savings Account

401(k) with match

Paid vacation

Wellness time

Maternity leave

Life insurance

Job summary

Alarm.com is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead SDA Platform efforts, shaping the proxy API, shared libraries, and developer tooling essential to hundreds of services. You will write code, drive design sessions, and remain close to production, with impact across the organization.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in software engineering, strong C#/.NET Core, and a track record of leading platform initiatives. Expect to work with Kubernetes, Kafka, and comprehensive observability tooling in a

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience with C# and .NET Core; distributed systems and microservices architecture.
• Proven ability to lead technical work on a team and maintain high quality.
• Experience designing and building shared platform libraries or internal tooling.
• Experience with event streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka) and background service patterns.
• Understanding of distributed systems concepts: caching (Redis), high availability, service decomposition.
• Strong architectural instincts for domain boundaries and decoupling.
• Experience with Kubernetes deployments and modern observability tooling (Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Excellent communication skills for design docs and code reviews.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: drive the SDA Platform team's direction and ensure high standards and operational excellence.
• Platform Library Stewardship: evolve shared SDA libraries (Alarm.Kafka, Alarm.AspNetCore.*, Alarm.BackgroundService, Alarm.Caching.Redis, Alarm.CronJobs).
• Domain Architecture: untangle Customer Accounts, Logins, Profiles into bounded services.
• Developer Experience: improve SDA DX via templates, Backstage integration, contract testing, and delivery tooling.
• Cross-Team Influence: participate in architecture reviews and promote platform best practices.
• Observability & Operations: build Grafana dashboards, validate alerts, support load testing.
• Mentorship: coach engineers, lead code reviews, raise technical bar.
• AI Enablement: apply AI tools judiciously to improve workflows.
• Bring your ideas: help shape platform direction beyond specs.
• Other duties as assigned.

Skills

C# & .NET Core

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Kafka

Kubernetes

Observability tooling

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or related

Tools

Kafka

Kubernetes

Grafana

Backstage

Argo Rollouts

Redis

Azure

Job description

Alarm.com is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead SDA Platform efforts, shaping the proxy API, shared libraries, and developer tooling essential to hundreds of services. You will write code, drive design sessions, and remain close to production, with impact across the organization.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years in software engineering, strong C#/.NET Core, and a track record of leading platform initiatives. Expect to work with Kubernetes, Kafka, and comprehensive observability tooling in a