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Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries. The company provides institutional-grade APIs for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts. Backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier investors including Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator, Alpaca operates a globally distributed team of 400+ members.
As a Full-Stack Platform Engineer on the Platform Team, you will develop and operate Alpaca's authentication, authorization, and Identity Provider (IdP) systems—the critical infrastructure handling user login, access control, and secure access across APIs, customer products, and internal tools.
You will own services end-to-end: API design, data modeling, deployments, and production debugging. Most of your time will be spent writing Go for backend services, gRPC/REST APIs, and shared client libraries, with meaningful work in React/TypeScript for auth-related UI and occasionally Java for identity-provider extensions. You will also work with Helm charts, analyze logs and metrics, manage deployments, and help other teams integrate with your services.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building and improving authentication-related experiences in customer and partner web applications (login, permissions, credential management)
- Developing and maintaining authentication, authorization, and IdP services
- Creating and evolving shared libraries and SDKs
- Integrating with identity providers and maintaining reliable login and access policies across products
- Deploying, monitoring, and troubleshooting identity services in production
- Modernizing legacy authentication patterns as the platform evolves
- Owning work end-to-end from requirements through delivery and follow-up
- Collaborating with other engineering teams on identity and access integration
- Maintaining high code quality, writing tests, and participating in code reviews
- Investigating incidents and bugs, including on-call rotation participation
REQUIREMENTS (Must-Haves):
- 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least 1 year of experience in Go
- Experience building web applications with React and TypeScript
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred, but fundamentals matter most)
- Prior startup experience—you thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, balance technical debt with speed, and proactively tackle whatever needs to get done
- Comfort taking tasks from start to finish: gathering requirements, implementing technical solutions, deploying, and monitoring results
- At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale
NICE-TO-HAVES:
- Knowledge of JWT tokens, OpenID Connect, SAML, or Keycloak; prior authentication systems experience
- Experience with role-based access control
- Experience building or maintaining OpenAPI-driven HTTP APIs
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and Helm
- Java experience
- Understanding of Kafka or Redpanda
- Experience with Grafana's observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo, PromQL)
