Senior Software Engineer - Platform at Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure provider, offering services for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round has injected over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. Through our subsidiaries, Alpaca operates as a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries, including broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, collectively managing over 9 million brokerage accounts. Our global team comprises over 230 diverse members, including experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals, all working towards our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We are deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and its robust underlying infrastructure. Alpaca is proudly supported by top-tier global investors such as Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members

We are a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We are actively searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values - Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable - and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining the shared services that underpin Alpaca's operations, including our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure and authentication and authorization systems. We are seeking experienced developers who are not afraid to engage deeply with infrastructure management. We own both client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries, and manage our own deployments. While the majority of our time is spent writing Go code, we also work on Helm charts, analyze logs and metrics, manage deployments, and generally assist with a wide variety of tasks.

Things You Get To Do

• Maintain and improve our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure.
• Develop the replacement for Alpaca’s legacy authentication and authorization services.
• Create event-driven solutions to modernize batch processing across our systems.
• Take full ownership of tasks, proactively identify and address technical challenges, and propose innovative solutions.
• Contribute to architectural decisions, offering valuable insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems.
• Collaborate with other teams to enhance system interactions and improve Alpaca systems overall.
• Maintain high software quality and robust test coverage.
• Actively participate in code reviews.
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs.
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with time-sensitive engineering projects.

Who You Are (must-haves)

• You have 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least one year of experience in Go.
• You are familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics. You can easily write a Helm chart for a new service, understand security best practices, and have prior job experience or certifications to demonstrate this.
• You have prior experience with relational databases; we use PostgreSQL, but a solid grasp of fundamentals is key regardless of specific database experience.
• You have experience working at a startup, understanding that plans can change, technical debt exists, certain tasks simply need to be done, and processes/documentation may not always be readily available.
• You are capable of taking a task from initiation to completion, including gathering requirements, designing and implementing optimal technical solutions, and then deploying and monitoring results.
• You have worked at least 3 years on systems operating at scale.

Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)

• You understand how Kafka works, perhaps having even worked with Redpanda previously.
• You know what a JWT token is and how OpenID Connect and SAML function. You might even be familiar with Keycloak or have worked on authentication systems before.
• You have experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments using Argo CD or Terraform, or have utilized Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine.
• You are familiar with Grafana’s observability stack, including Prometheus, Tempo, and related tools. You may have even written a PromQL query for a new alert once or twice.
• You are familiar with FlatBuffers and Protocol Buffers, have written or consumed gRPC services, and can design simple RESTful APIs.

How We Take Care of You

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

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy.