Senior Site Reliability Engineer Alpaca · Remote · Worldwide · Site Reliability Pay not stated 2mo ago

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & stock options

One-time USD 500 home-office setup

Monthly USD 150 stipend

Job summary

Alpaca, a US-headquartered brokerage infrastructure leader, is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help keep our trading platform reliable, observable, and operable while growing our cloud and data stack. The role emphasizes PostgreSQL reliability, incident response, and deep ownership of infrastructure across Kubernetes and GitOps workflows.

The ideal candidate has 4+ years in SRE/DevOps, hands-on Kubernetes, and strong Python or Go skills, with a passion for building scalable,

Qualifications

• 4+ years in SRE/DevOps with production ownership.
• Hands-on Kubernetes and GitOps experience.
• Strong PostgreSQL fundamentals in production.

Responsibilities

• Operate production day-to-day including on-call and postmortems.
• Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets with teams.
• Improve observability across metrics, logs, traces and alerts.
• Ship infrastructure as code via GitOps for cloud and Kubernetes.
• Manage PostgreSQL performance, migrations, HA/DR, and CDC.

Skills

SRE experience

Kubernetes

GitOps

PostgreSQL in prod

Linux (operator)

Go or Python

Incident response

Observability

Cloud networking

SQL tuning

Tools

pgx

gorm

sqlc

Job description

Senior Site Reliability role at Alpaca. Remote.

devopsroles summary, based on the employer's posting.

What you'll do

• Handle production support from on-call response through incident reviews and the fixes that follow
• Set reliability targets and error budgets, then help product teams work within those limits
• Improve metrics, logs, traces and alerts so teams can see service health
• Deliver cloud and Kubernetes changes as code through a GitOps process
• Tune PostgreSQL, review schema changes, plan safe large-table migrations, and strengthen database recovery and CDC

What you bring

• At least four years in SRE, DevOps, platform, infrastructure or backend work with substantial production ownership
• You have operated production workloads on Kubernetes and delivered infrastructure as code through GitOps
• You can assess PostgreSQL query plans, use pg_stat_*, weigh indexing and schema choices, and plan safe online migrations
• You bring cloud networking knowledge, operator-level Linux skills, and hands‑on incident response experience
• You can work in Go or Python and communicate clearly in writing and conversation

Who this fits

This senior role suits an experienced production engineer who wants to deepen PostgreSQL reliability expertise while continuing broader SRE work. You’ll also mentor engineers through reviews and pairing. The role is remote.

From the employer

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent‑first brokerage infrastructure for 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.
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!

Your Role:

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Alpaca, you'll help keep our brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we grow - working across our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer. We're especially interested in candidates with strong PostgreSQL fundamentals who'd like to grow into deeper ownership of our database reliability posture: PostgreSQL sits on the trading‑critical path, and we want this person to spend a meaningful share of their time leveling it up while still being a well‑rounded SRE the rest of the week.

Things You Get To Do

• Operate production day‑to‑day - oncall, incident response, postmortems, and the follow‑ups that actually close the loop.
• Own reliability practice - define and refine SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, and help product teams live within them.
• Strengthen our observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
• Ship infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow - cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads alike.
• Look after PostgreSQL: performance tuning, schema and migration review, online migrations on large tables, HA/DR, and CDC pipelines.
• Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through code review, design review, and pairing.

Who You Are (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 what a safe online migration looks like on a non‑trivial table.
• Cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, TLS) and comfort debugging cross‑service connectivity.
• Comfortable with a modern observability stack and proficient with Linux at the operator level.
• Practiced in 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 in growing your PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.

Who You Might Be (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 (e.g. pgx, gorm, sqlc).
• Production experience with messaging systems at scale (e.g. 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.

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.