Senior Software Engineer - Platform

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.

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 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a dynamic group of 400+ distributed members across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including 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 Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining the shared services that keep Alpaca running, including our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure and authentication and authorization systems.

We are looking for experienced developers who are not afraid to get their hands dirty with managing infrastructure. We own both client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries, and manage our own deployments. Most of our time is spent writing Go code, but we also work on Helm charts, analyze logs and metrics, manage deployments, and help with a wide variety of engineering challenges.

Responsibilities

• 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 replace batch processing across our systems
• Take ownership of tasks, proactively identify and address technical challenges, and propose innovative solutions
• Contribute to architectural decisions for scalable and reliable systems
• Collaborate with other teams to improve service interactions and overall system reliability
• Maintain high software quality and comprehensive test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• Participate in on-call rotations to assist with critical engineering projects as needed

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least 1 year of experience in Go
• Kubernetes expertise beyond the basics, including writing Helm charts for new services and applying security best practices
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)
• Startup experience with an understanding of navigating technical debt, ambiguity, and fast-paced environments
• Proven ability to take tasks from start to finish: requirements gathering, solution design, implementation, deployment, and monitoring
• 3+ years of experience working on distributed systems at scale

Nice-to-Haves

• Understanding of Kafka or experience with Redpanda
• Knowledge of JWT, OpenID Connect, SAML, or experience with Keycloak and auth systems
• Infrastructure as Code experience using Argo CD, Terraform, GCP, or GKE
• Experience with Grafana’s observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo, PromQL)
• Familiarity with FlatBuffers, Protocol Buffers, gRPC, and RESTful API design

Benefits

• 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