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 230+ 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 an Operations Reliability Engineer, you will embed directly within brokerage operations functions to systematically eliminate manual work and replace it with durable, auditable software systems. You start by immersing yourself in operational workflows: observing, documenting, and deeply understanding processes end-to-end before designing solutions. Every recurring manual process is treated as a system defect, and every fix you ship is measured by its real-world impact on efficiency and reliability.
You will work closely with licensed brokerage staff, domain experts, and platform engineers to build automations and tooling that allow Alpaca's operations to scale globally without scaling headcount linearly. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable shadowing an operational process and architecting the backend service that replaces it.
Things You Get To Do
- Design, build, test, deploy, and monitor production automations and UIs that remove manual steps and reduce operation time.
- Partner with frontend engineers to productize ops tooling so global teams can run functions with predictable staffing.
- Execute operational procedures to surface painful manual processes prior to automation.
- Instrument and report baseline and outcome metrics (MTTC, manual-steps removed, queue sizes, ops satisfaction) and iterate based on measured impact.
- Produce Platform Opportunity Briefs / RFCs for higher-level platform tooling and automations
- Collaborate with licensed BD leadership, Compliance, and Security to build auditable, safe automations with role-based access and clear runbooks.
- Own the full lifecycle of the systems you build, including automated deployment (CI/CD with tools like ArgoCD and Terraform), proactive monitoring, On-call support rotations and incident response, following a "you build it, you run it" philosophy.
- Build systems with auditability, traceability, and data lineage as a first-class concern to ensure transparency for our auditors and regulators.
Who You Are (must-haves)
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping and operating complex, large-scale systems in production.
- Strong business sense and understanding of operations
- Deep, hands-on expertise in Golang, including a strong command of its concurrency models (goroutines, channels), memory management, and standard library.
- Proven track record of building user-facing features end-to-end with Typescript/React
- Proficient with SQL and relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
- Demonstrated ability to reason about human workflows as systems, not just software services.
- Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
- Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to deconstruct complex requirements into clear technical components and excellent communication skills for working in a cross-functional environment.
- High ownership mindset with bias toward durable, structural fixes over tactical patches.
Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)
- Knowledge of service oriented architectures
- Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP).
- Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
- A passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
- Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
- Demonstrable experience in designing, building, and reasoning about distributed systems, including a strong understanding of microservices architecture and API design patterns (e.g., REST, gRPC).
- Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
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.
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