Senior Software Engineer - Platform

Who We Are: Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision. 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 9 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members: We're a dynamic team of 380+ 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. Your Role As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining the shared services that keep Alpaca running, including our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure and authentication and authorization systems. We are looking for experienced developers who are not afraid to get their hands dirty with managing infrastructure. We own both client-facing and internal services, we maintain shared libraries, and we manage our own deployments. Most of our time is spent writing Go code, but we also work on Helm charts, analyze logs and metrics, manage our own deployments, and, in general, get called in to help with a large variety of tasks. Things You Get To Do Maintain and improve our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure Develop the replacement for Alpaca’s aging authentication and authorization services Create event-driven solutions to replace batch processing all across our systems Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions Contribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems Work with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in general Maintain good software quality and test coverage Participate in code reviews Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature Who You Are (must-haves) You have 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least one year of experience in Go . You are familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics - you can write a Helm chart for a new service with relative ease, you understand best practices around security, and you have prior job experience or certifications to prove this. You have worked with relational databases before - we use PostgreSQL , but we are not particularly picky about this one as long as you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals. You have worked at a startup before - you understand that things don’t always go according to plan, that there is significant technical debt, that some tasks just need to be done, and that sometimes there are no processes or documentation to guide your hand. Y