Data Platform Engineer

Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts. Backed by $400 million in funding, with a team of 400+ globally distributed members.

• Design, develop, and evolve Alpaca's core data platform, including distributed query engines, orchestration, lakehouse storage, metadata, and cataloging
• Own lakehouse infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible on Kubernetes
• Build and operate scalable, low-latency streaming and CDC pipelines alongside batch ingestion paths into Apache Iceberg
• Develop and scale serving and BI infrastructure for governed, self-service access to lakehouse data
• Take end-to-end ownership of platform reliability through observability, alerting, on-call, incident response, runbooks, and SLOs
• Partner with DevOps, Analytics Engineering, and stakeholders to close infrastructure gaps

• 4+ years in software engineering, data infrastructure, or platform engineering with ownership of complex production systems
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and production experience with query engines such as Trino or Presto
• Strong experience operating Kubernetes-based data infrastructure using Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or Argo CD
• Experience designing and operating compute platforms across multiple cloud regions
• Hands-on experience with cloud lakehouse architectures on GCP, AWS, or Azure, including object storage, metastores, and Apache Iceberg
• Experience operating large-scale streaming and CDC systems using Kafka, Redpanda, and Debezium
• Strong Python and SQL skills with Airflow and Airbyte
• Strong operational judgment and ability to communicate trade-offs

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card