Senior DevOps Engineer

Alpaca; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home-office setup

Monthly stipend

Job summary

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in brokerage infrastructure. We are seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to design, build and operate platforms behind software delivery, edge and L7 networking, and observability.

You will own production changes, deploy across clusters and regions, and drive reliability for hundreds of millions of requests daily. You will work in a distributed, async-first team with a follow-the-sun model, collaborating with engineers across time zones to ship fast,

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a DevOps/Platform/SRE role.
• Experience managing multi-quarter platform work end to end in a complex environment running multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Deep production Kubernetes experience with upgrades, debugging and ownership, including Helm packaging and deployment.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform and GitOps as a core principle.
• Proven experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines at scale (GitHub Actions, multi-location releases).
• GitOps delivery with Argo CD or equivalent.
• GCP (GKE) production experience; fluent operating in day-to-day GCP.
• Solid L7 networking fundamentals (load balancing, DNS, TLS, HTTP routing).
• Platform-as-a-Product mindset with self-serve capabilities.
• Willing to participate in a Follow-The-Sun on-call rotation from APAC/EMEA hours and work in a distributed, async-first team.

Responsibilities

• Help the engineers who build on our platform; troubleshoot and rotate on-call during region hours.
• Participate in Follow-The-Sun on-call: triage alerts, incidents, structured debugging and post-mortems.
• Own the path changes take to production – GitHub Actions into Argo CD with Helm; release tooling across clusters/regions.
• Run high-traffic edge and API gateway infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of requests daily.
• Operate internal tooling (Grafana, Sentry, Teleport, Metabase, Atlantis, etc.) as production services.
• Advance Platform-as-a-Product by building self-serve capabilities and golden paths for engineers.
• Take improvement projects end-to-end from problem framing to production rollout.

Skills

DevOps

Kubernetes

GitOps

Terraform

Go

GCP

Argo CD

Helm

CI/CD pipelines

Linux

Tools

Grafana

Sentry

Teleport

Metabase

Atlantis

Terraform

Go

Job description

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructurefor stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

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 10 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 $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ 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.

Role

As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will design, build and operate the platforms behind software delivery, edge and L7 networking, platform access, and the application-facing parts of our observability stack. Alpaca is expanding fast and our needs grow with it, so we run a follow-the-sun model that keeps those systems covered around the clock. This role is the team's presence in its own region: supporting and owning that platform in your timezone.

While we are not looking for a specialist in a single tool, deep expertise in one of the tools we use alongside a broad skillset would be an advantage. What we care about most is judgement: thinking in terms of delivery and the request path, understanding business priorities and the pressure that comes with fast growth, and carrying a piece of work across quarters to a high standard without needing supervision. The engineers who do well here choose the simple solution over the easy one, even when the simple one takes longer to find.

Things You Get To Do

• Help the engineers who build on our platform: troubleshoot problems across the stack, advise teams on how to use what we run, and take your share of the support rotation during your region's hours.
• Participate in our Follow-The-Sun on-call model: watch and triage alerts, join and declare incidents, lead structured debugging and escalation, and drive blameless post-mortems and the post-actions that actually close the loop.
• Own the path a change takes to production - GitHub Actions into Argo CD, with Helm underneath - and the release tooling that has to work across multiple clusters and regions.
• Run high-traffic edge and API gateway infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of requests a day globally, where performance, availability and safe change all matter at once.
• Operates the internal tooling the rest of engineering depends on - Grafana, Sentry, Teleport, Metabase, Atlantis and others - as production services with real users rather than one-off installations.
• Advance Platform-as-a-Product: build self-serve capabilities and paved paths so engineers can get what they need through a golden path rather than a hand-off, measured by how quickly and safely the rest of engineering can ship.
• Take improvement projects end to end, from a problem nobody has framed yet through to something running in production that other teams rely on.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 5+ years in a DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or SRE role, with a proven track record operating large-scale, high-availability, high-performance systems in production.
• A track record of carrying multi-quarter platform work end to end in a complex environment running multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Deep production Kubernetes experience across multiple clusters - upgrades, debugging and day-to-day operational ownership - including packaging and deploying workloads with Helm.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code skills with Terraform, structuring codebases across multiple environments, with GitOps as a first principle and least-privilege as a default mindset.
• Proven experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines at scale, for example with GitHub Actions, including releases that deploy to multiple production locations rather than only promoting through environments.
• GitOps continuous delivery with Argo CD, or a comparable tool you can transfer from.
• Working production experience on Google Cloud, ideally GKE. You do not need to have designed landing zones or cloud topology, but you should be fluent operating on GCP day to day.
• Solid L7 networking fundamentals - load balancing, DNS, TLS and HTTP routing - and comfort debugging the request path from edge to workload.
• A Platform-as-a-Product mindset, treating what the team runs as products with real users rather than internal installations.
• Able and willing to take part in a Follow-The-Sun on-call rotation from APAC or EMEA hours, and to work effectively in a distributed, async-first team with strong written communication.

Who You Might Be (Bonus Points)

You can succeed in this role without all of the below, but any of these will help you ramp faster.

• Policy-as-code and IaC quality tooling (OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tflint, Atlantis, or similar).
• Experience managing Terraform state, module registries and versioning at scale across many teams.
• Running secret management at scale (HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or similar) as a service other teams depend on.
• Internal PKI and certificate lifecycle management (private CAs, issuance and rotation, mTLS between services).
• Experience building self-serve developer platforms and internal golden paths (e.g. with Backstage, Tilt, or similar).
• Production experience on Azure alongside GCP.
• Working proficiency in Go for automation and tooling.
• Strong Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) and container (Docker/containerd) fundamentals.
• Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, audit logging).
• Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.

How We Take Care of You:

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• 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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in Alpaca ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

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