Senior DevOps Engineer
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.
Role
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.
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.
Things You Get To Do
- Design and evolve 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.
- Build and own 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.
- Advance 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.
- Strengthen 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.
- Operate our GKE clusters and the infrastructure services that run on them - Helm-packaged workloads, message brokers (RabbitMQ, IBM MQ) and data stores.
- Participate 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.
- Embed SRE practices - SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning - into how Core Infrastructure builds and operates, working closely with our SRE function.
Who You Are (Must-Haves)
- 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.
- Deep hands-on experience designing cloud architecture on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the primary cloud - landing zones, networking, IAM and high-availability topology.
- 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.
- Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines for IaC - automated plan/apply, code review, Policy-as-Code, drift detection and safe rollout.
- Significant production experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE) and packaging/deploying workloads with Helm.
- Solid cloud and L3/L4-L7 networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, TLS, interconnects) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.
- Hands-on experience with a modern observability stack - Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Alertmanager - across metrics, logs, traces and alerting.
- Operator-level familiarity with data stores such as PostgreSQL and Message Brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ, RedPanda) - able to run and troubleshoot them in production.
- A good understanding of SRE practices - SLOs/error budgets, capacity planning - and a Platform-as-a-Product mindset.
- 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.
- 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.
Who You Might Be (Bonus Points)
You can succeed in this role without all of the below, but any of these will help you ramp faster:
- Policy-as-code and IaC quality tooling (OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tflint, Atlantis, or similar).
- Experience managing Terraform state, module registries and versioning at scale across many teams.
- Experience building self-serve developer platforms and internal golden paths (e.g. with Backstage, Tilt, or similar).
- Experience with the Alloy collector and with incident tooling such as Rootly.
- Working proficiency in Go for automation and tooling.
- Strong Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) and container (Docker/containerd) fundamentals.
- Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).
- Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains, and with low-latency systems.
How We Take Care of You:
- Competitive Salary & Stock Options
- Health Benefits
- New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
- Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.