Senior SRE - APAC Remote at Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and more. We are a licensed financial services company serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs, including broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts. Our global team of 400 plus members thrives working from various locations worldwide, including the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. We are deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community while continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and robust infrastructure. Alpaca is proud to be backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors such as Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Your Role as a Site Reliability Engineer

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Alpaca, you will be instrumental in keeping our brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we scale. Your work will span our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer. We have a specific focus on candidates with strong PostgreSQL fundamentals who are interested in growing deeper ownership over our database reliability posture, as PostgreSQL is critical to our trading path and requires continuous elevation of its reliability.

Responsibilities - Things You Get To Do

• Operate production systems on a day-to-day basis.
• Manage oncall duties, incident response, and conducting thorough postmortems to drive actionable improvements.
• Own the reliability practice for your domains.
• Define and refine Service Level Indicators and Service Level Objectives, ensuring product teams adhere to defined error budgets.
• Strengthen our observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting mechanisms.
• Ship infrastructure through code utilizing a GitOps workflow, covering both cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads.
• Oversee PostgreSQL functions, including performance tuning, schema and migration review, handling online migrations on large tables, and managing High Availability and Disaster Recovery plans, as well as Change Data Capture pipelines.
• Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through active participation in code reviews, design reviews, and pairing sessions.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Possess 4 or more years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or backend engineering, with significant ownership over production operations.
• Must have hands-on experience operating production services on Kubernetes and shipping infrastructure as code using a GitOps workflow.
• Must possess a solid working knowledge of PostgreSQL in a production environment, including query plans, pg_stat_* usage, indexing and schema trade-offs, and the process for safe online migrations on non-trivial tables.
• Understand cloud networking fundamentals such as VPC routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, and TLS, and be comfortable debugging cross-service connectivity issues.
• Comfortable utilizing a modern observability stack and proficient in Linux at the operator level.
• Proven experience in incident response, demonstrating calmness under pressure and utilizing structured debugging and postmortems that lead to genuine change.
• Must have at least working proficiency in Go or Python, coupled with strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Display a genuine interest in databases and a desire to deepen your PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Deeper PostgreSQL expertise: managing large clusters under OLTP load, ownership of HA/DR for large tables, connection pooling at scale, or change-data-capture pipelines.
• Experience with typed SQL access layers in Go (e.g. pgx, gorm, sqlc).
• Production experience with messaging systems at scale (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda).
• Experience with security and compliance within regulated environments (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).
• Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.

What We Offer

• Competitive Salary and Stock Options.
• Comprehensive Health Benefits.
• New Hire Home-Office Setup, including a one time USD $500 stipend.
• Monthly Stipend of USD $150 provided via a Brex Card.

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.