Staff Software Engineer Platform
Alpaca is a brokerage infrastructure company providing developer APIs for stocks, options, fixed income, and crypto trading, plus tokenization infrastructure for TradFi–DeFi markets.
Funding history
Investors
About Alpaca
Alpaca provides API-first brokerage infrastructure for fintechs, institutions, algorithmic traders, and developers. Its offerings include Broker API, Trading API, market data, self-clearing brokerage services, crypto services, and the Instant Tokenization Network for in-kind minting and redemption of tokenized assets.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will set the technical direction for the event-streaming platform and build its hardest components. You will design real-time client delivery, event-driven standards, shared libraries, identity integrations, resilience testing, and production operations while leading through RFCs, mentoring, design reviews, and incident response.
Requirements
- 8 or more years of professional engineering experience
- Experience architecting production Kafka or Redpanda streaming systems
- Experience delivering real-time client data through WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming
- Experience leading technical direction across teams through decisions and RFCs
- Experience building or maintaining shared libraries
- Experience mentoring senior engineers
- Knowledge of identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience
- Kubernetes and Helm experience with security best practices
- Relational-database experience
- Startup experience
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture and long-term direction of the event-streaming platform
- Lead the transition from batch systems to event-driven systems
- Design scalable user-facing streaming with fan-out, backpressure, ordering, delivery guarantees, and failure handling
- Set event-driven standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency, versioning, and deprecation
- Own shared streaming libraries
- Shape authentication and authorization where identity meets streaming
- Partner on chaos testing, game days, test tooling, and pre-production gates
- Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and delegate growth opportunities
- Participate in platform on-call and lead shared-infrastructure incidents
Benefits
- Stock options
- Health benefits
- One-time USD 500 new-hire home-office setup
- USD 150 monthly stipend via a Brex Card