Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering at Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a global leader, headquartered in the US, providing agent-first brokerage infrastructure for a wide range of financial instruments including stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading. Our licensed financial services subsidiaries serve hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries, managing over 10 million brokerage accounts for broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges. Our diverse team comprises experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals dedicated to democratizing financial services worldwide. We are committed to open-source contributions, fostering a vibrant community, and continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and robust infrastructure. Alpaca has secured $400 million in funding from leading global investors such as Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, and Y Combinator.

Our dynamic team of over 400 globally distributed members thrives working from their favorite locations across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. We seek passionate individuals aligned with our core values: Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable, who are eager to make a significant impact on Alpaca's rapid growth.

Your Role: Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will be instrumental in building and maintaining the frameworks, tooling, and CI/CD infrastructure that empower Alpaca's engineers to deploy new features quickly and reliably. This core software engineering position involves extensive coding in Go, designing advanced automated test frameworks, and delving into application code and Kubernetes as required. A crucial aspect of this role is redefining our approach to quality using Artificial Intelligence, specifically leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-driven tools to generate tests, proactively identify regressions, and convert every incident into robust, automated coverage. We are looking for engineers who view quality as an engineering discipline and see AI as a powerful force multiplier, building systems that make testing fast, reliable, and effortless for dependent teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build comprehensive automated test frameworks for our REST and gRPC API surfaces.
• Utilize AI and LLM-based tools to accelerate test generation, enhance regression coverage, and transform production incidents into automated tests, embedding these practices into the engineering organization's core frameworks.
• Construct and maintain CI/CD pipelines, primarily using GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build.
• Develop and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure the platform's capacity to meet increasing demand.
• Implement chaos engineering practices, designing fault-injection and resilience experiments to uncover potential failure modes before they impact customers.
• Standardize tooling and infrastructure to elevate the daily developer experience.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to improve test coverage, reliability, and deployment speed across various services.
• Investigate application code to pinpoint the root causes of failures and drive solutions to completion.
• Mentor and guide product engineers, cultivating a strong culture of quality and continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Over 5 years of experience as a software engineer, specifically in building and maintaining production systems.
• Proficiency in strongly typed languages with at least 1 year of experience coding in Go.
• Fluency in AI-assisted engineering, actively using LLM-based tools in your workflow and possessing a clear perspective on their effectiveness in elevating quality.
• Prior experience in building and maintaining CI pipelines, preferably with GitHub Actions or Google Cloud Build.
• Demonstrated ability to design and build automated test frameworks, with a solid understanding of the challenges microservices present for reliable integration and end-to-end testing.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes beyond basic usage, including the ability to write Helm charts for new services, understanding security best practices, and relevant job experience or certifications.
• Experience working in a startup environment, understanding the dynamic nature, potential technical debt, the necessity of specific tasks, and adapting to evolving processes and documentation.
• A proactive approach to tasks, capable of taking a project from requirements gathering to technical solution implementation, deployment, and monitoring.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience using AI/LLM tooling for QA automation, such as test generation, flaky-test triage, or incident-to-regression pipelines, and insights into successful and unsuccessful approaches.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript, with the ability to build efficient Dockerfiles and secure container images.
• Experience implementing load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC), along with skill in analyzing pprof/trace output.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments using Argo CD or Terraform, or prior experience with Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine. Experience with Tilt and writing Kubernetes Operators is a plus.
• Practical experience with chaos engineering, conducting fault-injection or resilience experiments with tools like Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos, or Gremlin.
• Understanding of testing event-driven systems using Kafka or Redpanda.

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive Salary and Stock Options
• Comprehensive Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: A one-time stipend of USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

Alpaca is an equal opportunity workplace committed to diversity. Please review our Recruitment Privacy Policy. Interested candidates can also create a job alert for future opportunities at Alpaca.