Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering - 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.

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 diverse group of 400+ experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals working across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will build and own the frameworks, tooling, and CI/CD infrastructure that let Alpaca’s engineers ship new features quickly and reliably. This is a software engineering role at its core: you will spend most of your time writing Go, designing automated test frameworks, and digging into application code and Kubernetes when needed.

Just as importantly, you will help redefine how we use AI to raise the bar on quality—leveraging LLMs and AI-driven tooling to generate tests, catch regressions before they ship, and turn every incident into durable, automated coverage.

Responsibilities

• Design and build automated test frameworks across our REST and gRPC API surface.
• Leverage AI and LLM-based tooling to accelerate test generation, harden regression coverage, and turn production incidents into automated tests—embedding these practices into the frameworks the whole engineering org relies on.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build.
• Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing demand.
• Introduce chaos engineering practices, designing fault-injection and resilience experiments that surface failure modes before customers do.
• Standardize tooling and infrastructure to improve the day-to-day developer experience.
• Partner with other teams to raise test coverage, reliability, and speed across services.
• Dig into application code to root-cause failures and drive fixes to completion.
• Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer building and maintaining production systems.
• Experience writing code in strongly typed languages and at least 1 year of experience with Go.
• Fluent with AI-assisted engineering, actively using LLM-based tools in your workflow with a clear perspective on their strengths and limitations.
• Experience building and maintaining CI pipelines (ideally GitHub Actions or Google Cloud Build).
• Experience designing and building automated test frameworks, understanding microservice challenges for integration and end-to-end testing.
• Strong familiarity with Kubernetes beyond the basics (e.g., writing Helm charts, security best practices, or certifications).
• Startup experience—navigating technical debt, ambiguous environments, and minimal documentation.
• Proven ability to own tasks end-to-end: gathering requirements, implementing solutions, deploying, and monitoring.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience utilizing AI/LLM tooling to build QA automation (test generation, flaky-test triage, or incident-to-regression pipelines).
• Experience writing Python or TypeScript, creating efficient Dockerfiles, and building secure container images.
• Experience implementing load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC), alongside analyzing pprof/trace output.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience with Argo CD, Terraform, GCP, GKE, Tilt, or Kubernetes Operators.
• Background in chaos engineering using tools like Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos, or Gremlin.
• Experience testing event-driven architectures using Kafka or Redpanda.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Health benefits
• New hire home-office setup stipend ($500 USD)
• Monthly stipend ($150 USD per month via Brex)