Staff Platform Streaming Architect

Alpaca; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD 500

Monthly Stipend: USD 150 per month via

Stock Options

Medical, Dental, Vision

Supplemental health care

Health benefits from day 1

Job summary

Alpaca is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Platform team to own the technical direction of our streaming backbone and user-facing streaming infrastructure. You will drive architecture for Redpanda-based event streaming, author RFCs, and guide multi-team delivery with a focus on resilience and scalability.

You will mentor engineers, shape AuthN/AuthZ for real-time subscriptions, and collaborate with SRE and QA to validate resilience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience in distributed systems.
• Experience architecting event-driven platforms and real-time streaming.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of our event streaming platform end to end - Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries and user-facing streaming - and set its two-to-three-year direction.
• Lead the shift from batch to event-driven across Alpaca’s systems, working with the teams who own them rather than around them.
• Design user-facing streaming at scale: connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering and delivery guarantees, and the failure modes that only show up on a volatile market day.
• Set the standards for event-driven design - schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency - and own the shared libraries other teams build against.
• Shape AuthN/AuthZ direction across Alpaca and lead the work where identity meets streaming: authorizing real-time subscriptions, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, multi-tenant isolation.
• Help shape how Alpaca builds with AI - the schemas, contracts and event streams you own are the substrate our agentic development platform runs on.
• Lead through influence, mentoring, and design reviews to grow engineers and teams.
• Join the Platform on-call rotation and act as technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure.

Skills

8+ years exp

Go language

Event streaming

Redpanda

Kubernetes

Helm charts

Auth systems

PostgreSQL

Protobuf/Avro

CI/CD

Leadership

Tools

Protobuf

Avro

FlatBuffers

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

Terraform

Argo CD

PostgreSQL

Go

Job description

Alpaca is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Platform team to own the technical direction of our streaming backbone and user-facing streaming infrastructure. You will drive architecture for Redpanda-based event streaming, author RFCs, and guide multi-team delivery with a focus on resilience and scalability.

You will mentor engineers, shape AuthN/AuthZ for real-time subscriptions, and collaborate with SRE and QA to validate resilience.