Staff Platform Engineer - Real-Time Streaming & Auth

Alpaca; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health benefits

Home-office setup stipend

Brex card stipend

Job summary

Alpaca, a US-headquartered leader in brokerage infrastructure, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Platform team to own the streaming backbone (Redpanda) and related infrastructure. You will drive architecture, RFCs, and cross-team collaboration to shape the platform for the next two years.

You will work primarily in Go, contribute to authentication, developer experience, QA, and AI-native engineering, and mentor other engineers while staying hands-on on the hardest parts of the system.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience with large-scale systems.
• Proficient in Go or another strongly-typed language and quick to learn new ones.
• Architected event streaming systems (Kafka/Redpanda) with production depth.
• Delivered real-time data to clients via WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming.
• Led technical direction across teams with RFCs and design reviews.
• Built or maintained shared libraries with careful versioning and deprecation.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the event streaming platform end to end - Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries and user-facing streaming.
• Lead the shift from batch to event-driven across Alpaca's systems with cross-team collaboration.
• Design scalable user-facing streaming: fan-out, backpressure, ordering and failure modes.
• Set standards for event-driven design, including schema evolution and topic ownership.
• Shape AuthN/AuthZ for real-time subscriptions and token lifecycle on long-lived connections.
• Collaborate with SRE on chaos testing and game days for resilience.
• Mentor engineers and multiply impact through reviews and guided handoffs.
• Join Platform on-call rotation and lead incidents affecting shared infrastructure.

Skills

Go

Event streaming

Kafka

Redpanda

WebSockets

gRPC streaming

System design

Mentoring

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

RFC ownership

Security best practices

Tools

Helm charts

Argo CD

Terraform

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Alpaca, a US-headquartered leader in brokerage infrastructure, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Platform team to own the streaming backbone (Redpanda) and related infrastructure. You will drive architecture, RFCs, and cross-team collaboration to shape the platform for the next two years.

You will work primarily in Go, contribute to authentication, developer experience, QA, and AI-native engineering, and mentor other engineers while staying hands-on on the hardest parts of the system.