Remote opportunity at
AlpacaStaff Software Engineer - Platform
Alpaca is a global financial services company operating an agent-first brokerage infrastructure that serves institutional clients across forty countries with institutional-grade APIs. Backed by four hundred…
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About This Role
Alpaca is a global financial services company operating an agent-first brokerage infrastructure that serves institutional clients across forty countries with institutional-grade APIs. Backed by four hundred million dollars in funding from major investors, the organization employs over four hundred team members distributed globally. The Platform team is currently seeking a Staff Software Engineer to direct the technical strategy for the streaming platform. This position centers primarily on streaming architecture using…
Job Description
Alpaca is a global financial services company operating an agent-first brokerage infrastructure that serves institutional clients across forty countries with institutional-grade APIs. Backed by four hundred million dollars in funding from major investors, the organization employs over four hundred team members distributed globally. The Platform team is currently seeking a Staff Software Engineer to direct the technical strategy for the streaming platform.
This position centers primarily on streaming architecture using a Redpanda-based event backbone, alongside user-facing streaming infrastructure. In addition to streaming, the Platform team manages authentication, developer experience, quality assurance, and AI-native engineering. The role requires establishing multi-year technical direction, authoring architectural request for comments documents, guiding system-wide shifts from batch processing to event-driven architectures, and building critical components primarily using Go. Candidates should thrive in startup environments characterized by ambiguity and shifting priorities.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture of the event streaming platform encompassing Redpanda, client libraries, and user-facing streaming
- Drive the transition from batch to event-driven processing across company systems
- Design large-scale user-facing streaming capabilities handling connection fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure
- Establish standards for event-driven design including schema evolution, topic ownership, and idempotency
- Shape authentication and authorization direction where identity intersects with real-time streaming
- Contribute to the substrate for the agentic development platform and artificial intelligence integration
- Partner with Sre on chaos testing and game days for the event backbone
- Participate in the Platform on-call rotation and act as technical lead during shared infrastructure incidents
Requirements
- Minimum of eight years of professional engineering experience with systems running at real scale
- Professional experience writing Go or deep experience in another strongly-typed language with the ability to learn Go quickly
- Production depth in Kafka or Redpanda covering partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, and retention
- Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale via WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, or gRPC streaming
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority
- Experience building or maintaining shared libraries used by multiple teams
- Familiarity with Kubernetes including writing Helm charts and understanding security best practices
- Working experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL
- Prior startup experience adapting to ambiguous environments and changing priorities
Qualifications
- Experience working with an IDL or binary serialization format such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers
- Experience with change data capture tools like Debezium or PeerDB and PostgreSQL logical replication
- Background in authentication systems such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak, or Cognito
- Experience building agentic or AI-native developer tooling
- Experience running chaos engineering, game days, or fault-injection testing
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code using Argo CD or Terraform
- Experience with Grafana observability stacks including Prometheus and Tempo
- Experience working in fintech or another regulated domain
Core Skills
Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock options
- Health benefits
- One-time new hire home-office setup stipend of five hundred US dollars
- Monthly stipend of one hundred fifty US dollars via a Brex Card
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
What is the remote work policy for this position?
The source posting indicates that the employment type is full-time and the remote status is remote.
What is the salary range for the Staff Software Engineer role?
The salary is not stated in the job posting.
What technologies are primarily used on the Platform team?
Most of the team's time is spent working with Go, Helm charts, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and a Redpanda-based event backbone.
Sample Interview Questions
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