Staff Software Engineer - Platform

The posting, as Alpaca wrote it

Who We Are

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 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 $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.

Our Team Members

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our 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.

About the Role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will own the technical direction of Alpaca's streaming platform - our Redpanda-based event backbone and the user-facing streaming infrastructure. Platform also owns Authentication, Developer Experience and QA, and AI-Native Engineering. Streaming is roughly two-thirds of the job and where we expect you to become the deepest engineer in the company; across the other three you review the designs, hold an informed opinion, and lead the work where they meet streaming.

This is a Staff role, so we are hiring for direction as much as delivery - the engineer who decides what the streaming platform looks like in two years, writes the RFC that gets three teams to agree, and then builds the hard part. We own client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries nearly every team depends on, and manage our own deployments. Most of our time goes into Go, but we also write Helm charts, dig through logs and metrics, and get pulled into a wide variety of problems.

Things You Get To Do

• Own the architecture of our event streaming platform end to end - Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries and user-facing streaming - and set its two-to-three-year direction
• Lead the shift from batch to event-driven across Alpaca's systems, working with the teams who own them rather t

[…]
e curiosity about the others.

• You know Kubernetes beyond the basics: you can write a Helm chart with relative ease, you understand security best practices, and you have job experience or certifications to prove it.
• You have worked with relational databases - we use PostgreSQL, but we are not picky as long as the fundamentals are solid.
• You have worked at a startup before - you thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, know when to balance technical debt with speed, and proactively tackle whatever needs to get done without relying on pre-existing processes or documentation.

Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)

• You’ve worked with an IDL or binary serialization format (Protobuf, Avro; we use FlatBuffers) and handled schema evolution across many consumers.
• You have experience with change data capture (Debezium, PeerDB or similar) and understand how Postgres logical replication works.
• You’ve worked on auth systems - OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak or Cognito - especially around long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access.
• You’ve built agentic or AI-native developer tooling, or designed systems meant to be operated by agents rather than only by people.
• You’ve run chaos engineering or game days, or built the load and fault-injection testing that makes them worth running.
• You’ve done IaC with Argo CD or Terraform.
• You have experience with Grafana’s observability stack - Prometheus, Tempo and all the rest. You might have even written a PromQL query for a new alert once or twice.
• You’ve worked in fintech or another regulated domain and understand how compliance constraints shape architecture.

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.

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