Senior Software Engineer - Platform

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for various financial services. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team to develop and maintain shared services, including event streaming infrastructure and authentication systems.

Responsibilities:

• Maintain and improve our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure
• Develop the replacement for Alpaca’s aging authentication and authorization services
• Create event-driven solutions to replace batch processing all across our systems
• Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions
• Contribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems
• Work with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in general
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least one year of experience in Go
• Familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics - can write a Helm chart for a new service with relative ease, understands best practices around security, and has prior job experience or certifications to prove this
• Worked with relational databases before - solid grasp on the fundamentals
• Worked at a startup before - understands that things don't always go according to plan, that there is significant technical debt, that some tasks just need to be done, and that sometimes there are no processes or documentation to guide your hand
• Not afraid of taking a task from start to finish - gathering requirements, figuring out and implementing the best technical solution, then deploying and monitoring the results
• Worked at least 3 years on systems at scale
• Understand how Kafka works - maybe even worked with Redpanda before
• Know what a JWT token is, and how OpenID Connect and SAML work. Maybe even heard about Keycloak, or have worked on authentication systems before
• Done IaC deployments with Argo CD or Terraform, or have used Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine before
• Experience with Grafana's observability stack - Prometheus, Tempo and all the rest. Might have even written a PromQL query for a new alert once or twice
• Familiar with FlatBuffers and Protocol Buffers, have written or consumed gRPC services before, and can design simple RESTful APIs