Senior DevOps Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>Who We Are:</strong></p> <p><strong>Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure&nbsp;</strong>for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br><strong>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.</strong><br><br><strong>Our Team Members:</strong></p> <p>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!<br><br>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.</p></div><h3>Role</h3> <p>As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will design, build and operate the infrastructure that lets Alpaca scale globally and run trading-critical systems with confidence. You will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions against clearly defined goals - and a real voice in shaping those goals with the team.</p> <p>We are not hiring a specialist in any single tool. We are looking for a well-rounded infrastructure engineer who thinks in cloud architecture and Infrastructure-as-Code, with a genuine Platform-as-a-Product mindset: someone who measures success by how quickly and safely the rest of engineering can ship, and who treats manual toil as a bug to be engineered away. You are comfortable operating our data stores (PostgreSQL, Message Brokers) at an operator level, partnering with our SRE and database specialists on the deeper work.</p> <p><strong>Things You Get To Do</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Design and evolve </strong>our cloud architecture on GCP - networking, interconnects, IAM and high-availability topology - and express it entirely as code with Terraform, following GitOps as a first principle.</li> <li><strong>Build and own </strong>the CI/CD pipelines that plan, review, test and safely apply IaC changes - Policy-as-Code guardrails, drift detection and progressive rollout so infrastructure changes ship as confidently as application code.</li> <li><strong>Advance </strong>Platform-as-a-Product: build self-serve capabilities and paved paths so engineers can provision what they need, through a golden path rather than a hand-off.</li> <li><strong>Strengthen </strong>our observability stack - metrics, logs, traces and alerting across Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Alertmanager - so the platform is easy to run and reason about.</li> <li><strong>Operate </strong>our GKE clusters and the infrastructure services that run on them - Helm-packaged workloads, message brokers (RabbitMQ, IBM MQ) and data stores.</li> <li><strong>Participate </strong>in our Follow-The-Sun on-call model: watch and triage alerts, join and declare incidents, lead structured debugging and escalation, and drive blameless post-mortems and the post-actions that actually close the loop.</li> <li><strong>Embed </strong>SRE practices - SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning - into how Core Infrastructure builds and operates, working closely with our SRE function.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Who You Are (Must-Haves)</strong></p> <ul> <li>5+ years in a DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or SRE role, with a proven track record operating large-scale, high-availability, high-performance systems in production.</li> <li>Deep hands-on experience designing cloud architecture on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the primary cloud - landing zones, networking, IAM and high-availability topology.</li> <li>Strong Infrastructure-as-Code skills with Terraform, structuring large codebases across multiple environments, with GitOps as a first principle and least-privilege as a default mindset.</li> <li>Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines for IaC - automated plan/apply, code review, Policy-as-Code, drift detection and safe rollout.</li> <li>Significant production experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE) and packaging/deploying workloads with Helm.</li> <li>Solid cloud and L3/L4-L7 networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, TLS, interconnects) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with a modern observability stack - Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Alertmanager - across metrics, logs, traces and alerting.</li> <li>Operator-level familiarity with data stores such as PostgreSQL and Message Brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ, RedPanda) - able to run and troubleshoot them in production.</li> <li>A good understanding of SRE practices - SLOs/error budgets, capacity planning - and a Platform-as-a-Product mindset.</li> <li>Strong grasp of incident management end to end: joining and declaring incidents, structured debugging under pressure, escalation, clear documentation, and post-mortems that drive real change.</li> <li>Able and willing to take part in a Follow-The-Sun on-call rotation from APAC hours, and to work effectively in a distributed, async-first team with strong written communication.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Who You Might Be (Bonus Points)</strong></p> <p>You can succeed in this role without all of the below, but any of these will help you ramp faster:</p> <ul> <li>Policy-as-code and IaC quality tooling (OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tflint, Atlantis, or similar).</li> <li>Experience managing Terraform state, module registries and versioning at scale across many teams.</li> <li>Experience building self-serve developer platforms and internal golden paths (e.g. with Backstage, Tilt, or similar).</li> <li>Experience with the Alloy collector and with incident tooling such as Rootly.</li> <li>Working proficiency in Go for automation and tooling.</li> <li>Strong Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) and container (Docker/containerd) fundamentals.</li> <li>Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).</li> <li>Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains, and with low-latency systems.</li> </ul><div class="content-conclusion"><h3><strong>How We Take Care of You:</strong></h3> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Competitive Salary &amp; Stock Options</span></li> <li style="text-align: justify;">Health Benefits</li> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card</span></li> </ul> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.<br></span></em></p> <p><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><a href="https://files.alpaca.markets/disclosures/AlpacaRecruitmentPrivacyPolicy.pdf"><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recruitment Privacy Policy</span></em></a></span></p></div>