3 hours ago
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture and two-to-three-year technical direction of the Redpanda-based event streaming platform.
- Lead the transition from batch processing to event-driven systems across teams.
- Design user-facing streaming systems handling fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering, delivery guarantees, and failure modes at scale.
- Set standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency, shared libraries, versioning, and deprecation.
- Shape authentication and authorization for real-time subscriptions, long-lived connections, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Partner with SRE and QA on chaos testing, game days, test tooling, resilience, and pre-production gates.
- Mentor engineers, lead through influence, conduct design reviews, and coordinate technical direction across teams.
- Participate in the Platform on-call rotation and serve as technical lead during shared-infrastructure incidents.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional engineering experience, including several years running systems at real scale.
- Professional Go experience or deep experience in another strongly typed language with the ability to learn Go quickly.
- Production architecture experience with Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention, and delivery guarantees.
- Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale using WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming, including fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure.
- Proven experience driving technical direction across team boundaries, writing RFCs, and influencing without formal authority.
- Experience building or maintaining shared libraries with strong understanding of backward compatibility and deprecation.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers.
- Depth in at least one adjacent area such as identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience.
- Kubernetes experience beyond the basics, including writing Helm charts, understanding security best practices, and having relevant job experience or certifications.
- Experience with relational databases; PostgreSQL is used at Alpaca.
- Previous startup experience and comfort working in ambiguous, changing environments.
- Preferred experience with Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers and schema evolution across many consumers.
- Preferred experience with Debezium, PeerDB, or similar change data capture systems and PostgreSQL logical replication.
- Preferred experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak, or Cognito.
- Preferred experience building agentic or AI-native developer tooling, chaos engineering, game days, load testing, or fault-injection testing.
- Preferred experience with Argo CD, Terraform, Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, and PromQL.
- Preferred experience in fintech or another regulated domain.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock options.
- Health benefits.
- One-time USD $500 new-hire home-office setup.
- USD $150 monthly stipend via a Brex Card.
- Globally distributed team with teammates across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and other locations.
Tech Stack
About Alpaca
Alpaca builds brokerage infrastructure APIs and operates a self-clearing broker-dealer, enabling fintechs, institutions, and developers to embed trading in stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and fixed income. Its platform includes account opening, clearing, custody, and compliance tooling, with revenue from brokerage and platform fees. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Alpaca serves clients in 40+ countries through its subsidiaries.