Full-Stack Platform Engineer - Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, we power over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team of 400+ members spans the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. We are backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors.

About the Role

As a Full Stack Engineer on the Platform Team, you will develop and operate Alpaca’s authentication, authorization, and Identity Provider (IdP) systems—handling user login, access control, and secure access across our APIs, customer products, and internal tools.

You will own services end to end: API design, data modeling, deployments, and production debugging. Most of your time will be spent writing Go (backend services, gRPC/REST APIs, shared client libraries), with meaningful work in React/TypeScript for auth-related UI, and occasionally Java for identity-provider extensions.

What You Will Do

• Build and improve authentication-related experiences in customer and partner web applications, including login, permissions, and credential management.
• Develop and maintain the platform’s authentication, authorization, and IdP services.
• Create and evolve shared libraries and SDKs.
• Integrate with identity providers and keep login and access policies working reliably across products.
• Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot identity services in production.
• Help modernize legacy authentication patterns as the platform evolves.
• Own work end to end, from requirements through delivery and follow-up.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams on identity and access integration.
• Maintain high code quality, write tests, and participate in code reviews.
• Help investigate incidents and bugs, including participation in the on-call rotation.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least 1 year of experience in Go.
• Experience building web applications with React and TypeScript.
• Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL).
• Startup experience: ability to thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, balance technical debt with speed, and proactively tackle tasks without pre-existing processes.
• Capability to take a task from start to finish (gathering requirements, implementing technical solutions, deploying, and monitoring).
• 3+ years of experience working on systems at scale.

Nice-to-Haves

• Familiarity with JWT tokens, OpenID Connect, SAML, and Keycloak.
• Experience with role-based access control (RBAC).
• Experience building or maintaining OpenAPI-driven HTTP APIs.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and Helm.
• Experience with Java.
• Understanding of Kafka or Redpanda.
• Experience with Grafana’s observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo, PromQL).

Benefits

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