Senior Staff Software Engineer at Alarm.com
Tysons, VA
$167,500–$199,500
Jul 24, 2026
Tysons, VA
Jul 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role on a platform engineering team building large-scale smart home and IoT systems, covering areas such as video analytics and data processing. The position combines hands-on architecture and software development across multiple technology domains with significant mentorship of junior-to-lead engineers. It also involves production support, on-call duties, capacity planning, and database strategy, making it best suited to a seasoned engineer comfortable bridging technical leadership with operational ownership.
Senior level · 10+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Full-time
Pay in the description: $167,500–$199,500
Advertised as Staff, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,100 people in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 460–1,950
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
What the occupation pays Median $158,337 (middle half $126,441–$180,105). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The title says 'Senior Staff' but the requirements — 10+ years of experience, mentoring, and component/platform ownership — are consistent with a Senior engineer. The 'Staff' label appears to be a company-internal title inflation rather than a genuine org-wide technical authority role; seniority is assessed as Senior.
Degree requirement is listed as 'Bachelor's in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field OR equivalent work experience' — the explicit equivalent-experience escape means no hard degree gate.
Object-oriented programming is listed as a hard requirement; C# and .NET are explicitly called out as 'a plus', so they are marked preferred.
Observability is a hard requirement; Datadog, Grafana, and Wavefront are given as examples ('etc.'), so Datadog is listed as the primary with the others as alternatives and the group is marked preferred since the 'etc.' framing signals any comparable tool is acceptable.
SQL Server is called out as 'a plus' and cloud database technologies are also 'a plus' — both marked preferred.
SRE experience is explicitly called 'a plus' — marked preferred.
Location: Alarm.com is headquartered in Tysons/Fairfax, VA (Washington DC metro area); the posting requires 4 days/week in-office and is not remote.
No specific per-technology years are stated; the 10+ year figure is a role-level requirement captured in the overall years minimum.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): software architecture, database design, capacity planning.
Read the full posting
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