Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Database at Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 9 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our team consists of over 380 globally distributed members who thrive working from their favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're 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 Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Alpaca, you will ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems and services. You will work closely with development, operations, and DevOps teams to build and maintain robust applications, ensuring they run smoothly and efficiently. This role requires a blend of software engineering and operations skills, with a strong ability to troubleshoot complex technical issues and resolve problems before they impact our users.

Things You Get To Do

• Triage difficult technical problems and implement effective solutions.
• Continuously improve our observability stack (monitoring, logging, profiling).
• Incident Management: Respond to and resolve incidents in a timely manner, conducting post-incident reviews to identify and implement long-term improvements.
• Collaboration: Work closely with development teams to ensure new features and services are designed with reliability and scalability in mind from the outset.
• Capacity Planning: Monitor system capacity and performance, making data-driven recommendations and implementing changes to accommodate future growth.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Performance Engineering, or similar roles.
• 5+ years of experience with multi-terabyte scale PostgreSQL clusters.
• Proven track record of managing and maintaining large-scale, high-availability, and high-performance PostgreSQL databases.
• Experience designing and implementing SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for internal systems and databases.
• Experience with troubleshooting PostgreSQL performance problems and optimizing slow queries.
• Extensive experience with efficient schema design and efficient query design.
• Experience migrating multi-terabyte tables into more efficient schemas.
• Proficient with Go.
• Proficient with Prometheus.
• Proficient with Linux.
• Knowledgeable in trading/fintech domains.
• Experience with low-latency systems.
• Experience with distributed tracing.
• Experience scaling PostgreSQL clusters rapidly.
• Experience with pgx, gorm, or sqlc.

How We Take Care of You

• 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

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