Senior Software Development Engineer in Test at Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, self-clearing broker-dealer and developer-first brokerage infrastructure provider supporting stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and more. Backed by institutional investors, Alpaca builds APIs and platform services used by institutional customers worldwide. The company operates a distributed, remote-first engineering organization focused on reliability, security, and scalable systems.

Role overview

As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test on the Platform team, you will own and evolve Alpaca’s automated and manual testing infrastructure to help developers deliver features quickly and reliably. You will design test strategies, improve CI pipelines, and build frameworks and tooling that increase test coverage, speed, and stability for microservices and platform components.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy for Alpaca’s API surface and platform components.
• Improve developer experience by standardizing testing tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure around GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build.
• Coordinate with product and engineering teams to raise test coverage, reliability, and speed, and mentor engineers on testing best practices.
• Design and run load, stress, and scalability tests to validate platform capacity and performance under realistic conditions.
• Build, extend, and maintain automated test frameworks for integration, end-to-end, and system tests for microservices.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years experience as an SDET, Senior QA Engineer, or equivalent role focused on automation and CI pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with Go, at least one year working with Go on production services.
• Experience building and maintaining CI pipelines, familiarity with GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build.
• Experience with microservices architectures, containerization, and Kubernetes for test environments.
• Strong skill in building automated test frameworks and tooling for integration and end-to-end testing.
• Experience writing tests for performance and scalability, and analyzing pprof or trace outputs.
• Comfort working in a startup-like environment and taking ownership from requirements through deployment and monitoring.

Nice to have

• Experience coding in Python or TypeScript, and building secure Docker images.
• Implemented load tests with k6 or ghz, familiarity with event-driven systems and Kafka or Redpanda.
• Experience with Argo CD, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform, Tilt, or writing Kubernetes Operators.

How we support you

• Competitive salary and stock options.
• Health benefits.
• New hire home office setup payment and monthly remote stipend.

Location

Remote - Worldwide. This role is remote and collaborates across time zones.

How to apply

Apply via the job board by completing the application and attaching your resume and any supporting materials. Alpaca is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from diverse backgrounds.