Описание

This Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team will own the technical direction of Alpaca's streaming platform and user-facing streaming infrastructure, focusing on Redpanda-based event backbone, authentication, developer experience, and QA, with streaming making up two-thirds of the role.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of the event streaming platform end to end, including 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
Design user-facing streaming at scale, addressing connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering and delivery guarantees, and failure modes on volatile market days
Set the standards for event-driven design, including schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency, and own the shared libraries other teams build against, considering the cost of versioning and deprecation
Shape AuthN/AuthZ direction across Alpaca and lead work where identity meets streaming, such as authorizing real-time subscriptions, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, and multi-tenant isolation
Help shape how Alpaca builds with AI, leveraging owned schemas, contracts, and event streams as the substrate for the agentic development platform
Partner with SRE on chaos testing and game days for the event backbone, and with the QA stream on test tooling and pre-production gates to verify resilience
Lead through influence rather than authority, and multiply engineers through mentoring, design review, and delegating work that fosters growth
Join the Platform on-call rotation and act as technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure

Requirements

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 the ability to quickly learn Go
Experience architecting event streaming systems, with production depth in Kafka or Redpanda across partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention, delivery guarantees, and load behavior
Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale (WebSockets, SSE or gRPC streaming) and handling fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure in production
Demonstrated ability to drive technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority, including owning decisions and writing RFCs
Experience building or maintaining libraries depended on by many teams, with understanding of backward compatibility and deprecation costs
Experience mentoring senior engineers and improving team capabilities
Real depth in at least one adjacent area: identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience, with genuine curiosity about others
Knowledge of Kubernetes beyond basics: ability to write Helm charts with ease, understanding of security best practices, and relevant job experience or certifications
Experience with relational databases, specifically PostgreSQL fundamentals
Experience working at a startup, thriving in ambiguous environments, embracing changing priorities, balancing technical debt with speed, and proactively tackling tasks without relying on pre-existing processes or documentation

Nice to have

Experience with an IDL or binary serialization format (Protobuf, Avro, FlatBuffers) and handling schema evolution across many consumers
Experience with change data capture (Debezium, PeerDB or similar) and understanding of Postgres logical replication
Experience with auth systems (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak or Cognito), especially for long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access
Experience building agentic or AI-native developer tooling, or designing systems for agent operation
Experience running chaos engineering or game days, or building load and fault-injection testing
Experience with IaC using Argo CD or Terraform
Experience with Grafana’s observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo), including writing PromQL queries for alerts
Experience in fintech or another regulated domain and understanding of how compliance constraints shape architecture

We offer

Competitive Salary & Stock Options
Health Benefits
New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
Alpaca is an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce

Hiring process

Apply via the provided link