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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 Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you will help maintain and scale Alpaca's trading-critical brokerage platform. Your responsibilities span cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform management, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer operations. The role emphasizes deep PostgreSQL expertise—the database sits on the trading-critical path, and you will spend meaningful time leveling up the company's database reliability posture while remaining a well-rounded SRE across other infrastructure domains.
Key responsibilities include:
- Operating production systems day-to-day: oncall rotations, incident response, postmortems, and closure of follow-up items
- Defining and refining SLIs/SLOs and error budgets; helping product teams operate within them
- Strengthening observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting
- Shipping infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow (cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads)
- PostgreSQL ownership: performance tuning, schema and migration review, online migrations on large tables, HA/DR, and CDC pipelines
- Mentoring engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through code review, design review, and pairing
You will work in a remote-first environment with teammates across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. The company values curiosity, empathy, and accountability.
REQUIREMENTS (Must-Haves):
- 4+ years in SRE, DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or backend engineering with significant production operations ownership
- Hands-on experience operating production services on Kubernetes and shipping infrastructure as code in a GitOps workflow
- Solid working knowledge of PostgreSQL in production: query plans, pg_stat_*, indexing and schema trade-offs, and safe online migrations on non-trivial tables
- Cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, TLS) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity
- Comfort with a modern observability stack and proficiency with Linux at the operator level
- Practiced incident response: calm under pressure, structured debugging, postmortems that drive change
- At least working proficiency in Go or Python, plus strong written and verbal communication
- Genuine interest in databases and growing PostgreSQL/DBA expertise
Nice-to-Haves:
- Deeper PostgreSQL experience: large clusters at OLTP load, online migrations on big tables, HA/DR ownership, connection pooling at scale, or change-data-capture pipelines
- Experience with typed SQL access layers in Go (pgx, gorm, sqlc)
- Production experience with messaging systems at scale (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda)
- Security & compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging)
- Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains
