About the company
Alpaca is a US-headquartered global provider of brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading. It is a licensed financial services company serving financial institutions across 40 countries, with more than 10 million brokerage accounts. Its global team has over 400 members. Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding and is committed to open-source contributions and its developer-friendly API and infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and two-to-three-year technical direction of the event streaming platform, including Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming.
- Lead the transition from batch processing to event-driven systems across Alpaca.
- Design large-scale user-facing streaming, including connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering, delivery guarantees, and failure modes.
- Set standards for event-driven design, including schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, and idempotency; own shared libraries, versioning, and deprecation.
- Shape authentication and authorization direction, including real-time subscription authorization, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Help shape AI development through the schemas, contracts, and event streams underpinning the agentic development platform.
- Partner with SRE on chaos testing and game days, and with QA on test tooling and pre-production gates.
- Lead through influence, mentor engineers, review designs, and delegate growth opportunities.
- Join the Platform on-call rotation and act as technical lead during shared-infrastructure incidents.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional engineering experience, including several years operating systems at scale. Proficiency in Go, or deep experience in another strongly typed language and ability to learn Go quickly.
- Production architecture experience with Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention, delivery guarantees, and behavior under load.
- Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale with WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming, including production experience with fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure.
- Experience driving technical direction across teams, writing RFCs, and making decisions without formal authority.
- Experience building or maintaining widely used libraries, with knowledge of backward compatibility and deprecation.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers.
- Depth in at least one adjacent area: identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience; curiosity about the others.
- Kubernetes experience beyond the basics, ability to write Helm charts, understanding of security best practices, and relevant job experience or certifications.
- Relational database experience; Alpaca uses PostgreSQL.
- Previous startup experience and ability to work in ambiguous environments, adapt to changing priorities, balance technical debt with speed, and proactively handle work without relying on existing processes or documentation.
- Nice to have: experience with IDLs or binary serialization formats such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers, and schema evolution across consumers; change data capture such as Debezium or PeerDB and Postgres logical replication; OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak, or Cognito, especially for long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access; agentic or AI-native developer tooling; chaos engineering, game days, load or fault-injection testing; Argo CD or Terraform; Grafana observability tools including Prometheus and Tempo; fintech or regulated-domain experience.
Conditions
- Remote role covering Europe or the Americas.
- Competitive salary and stock options.
- Health benefits.
- One-time USD $500 new-hire home-office setup allowance.
- USD $150 monthly stipend via a Brex Card.