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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 $400M in funding from top-tier investors including Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator, Alpaca operates a globally distributed team of 400+ engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals.
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will own the technical direction of Alpaca's streaming platform—a Redpanda-based event backbone and user-facing streaming infrastructure. The Platform team also owns Authentication, Developer Experience, QA, and AI-Native Engineering. Streaming represents roughly two-thirds of the role and is where you will become the deepest engineer in the company; across the other three areas, you will review designs, hold informed opinions, and lead work where they intersect with streaming.
This is a Staff-level role focused on direction as much as delivery. You will decide what the streaming platform looks like in two to three years, write RFCs that align three teams, and build the hard parts. Responsibilities include owning the architecture of the event streaming platform end-to-end (Redpanda, UTS ecosystem, client libraries, user-facing streaming) and setting its multi-year direction; leading the shift from batch to event-driven systems across Alpaca by working collaboratively with owning teams; designing user-facing streaming at scale (connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering and delivery guarantees, failure modes on volatile market days); setting standards for event-driven design (schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency) and owning shared libraries other teams depend on; shaping AuthN/AuthZ direction and leading work where identity meets streaming (authorizing real-time subscriptions, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, multi-tenant isolation); helping shape how Alpaca builds with AI by owning the schemas, contracts, and event streams that power the agentic development platform; partnering with SRE on chaos testing and game days for the event backbone; leading through influence rather than authority and multiplying engineers through mentoring and design review; and joining the Platform on-call rotation as technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure.
The team works primarily in Go but also writes Helm charts, analyzes logs and metrics, and tackles a wide variety of infrastructure problems. You will own both client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries that nearly every team depends on, and manage deployments.
REQUIREMENTS (Must-Haves):
- 8+ years of professional engineering experience, including several years running systems at real scale
- Proficiency in Go, or deep experience in another strongly-typed language with ability to pick up Go quickly
- Architected event streaming systems in production (not just used them)—real depth in Kafka or Redpanda across partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention, delivery guarantees, and failure modes under load
- Delivered real-time data to clients at scale (WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming) and handled fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure in production
- Driven technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority; can point to decisions owned, RFCs written, and outcomes
- Built or maintained libraries many teams depend on; understand the actual cost of backward compatibility and deprecation
- Mentored senior engineers and left teams better than you found them
- Real depth in at least one adjacent area (identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience) with genuine curiosity about others
- Kubernetes knowledge beyond basics: can write Helm charts with ease, understand security best practices, have job experience or certifications
- Worked with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred, but fundamentals matter most)
- Startup experience—thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, balance technical debt with speed, proactively tackle what needs doing
NICE-TO-HAVES:
- Experience with IDL or binary serialization (Protobuf, Avro, FlatBuffers) and schema evolution across many consumers
- Change data capture experience (Debezium, PeerDB) and understanding of Postgres logical replication
- Auth systems work (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak, Cognito), especially around long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access
- Agentic or AI-native developer tooling, or systems designed to be operated by agents
- Chaos engineering, game days, or load and fault-injection testing
- IaC with Argo CD or Terraform
- Grafana observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo, PromQL)
- Fintech or regulated domain experience with understanding of compliance-driven architecture
