Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for various financial services. As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, you will enhance the testing infrastructure, ensuring developers can deliver new features quickly and reliably.

Responsibilities:

• Develop a comprehensive testing strategy for our API surface
• Improve developer experience by standardizing tooling and infrastructure
• Coordinate with other teams to improve test coverage, reliability and speed
• Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement within the team
• Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing user demands

Requirements:

• You have 5+ years of experience as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
• You have written code in strongly typed languages before and have at least 1 year of experience with Go
• You have built and maintained CI pipelines before - we use a mix of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build pipelines
• You have worked with microservices before and understand the challenges they pose for building reliable integrations and end-to-end tests
• You have experience designing and building automated test frameworks
• You are familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics - you can write a Helm chart for a new service with relative ease
• You understand best practices around security, and you have prior job experience or certifications to prove this
• You have worked at a startup before - you understand that things don't always go according to plan
• You are 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
• You have written code in Python or TypeScript
• You have experience writing efficient Dockerfiles and building secure container images
• You have implemented load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC) and have experience analyzing pprof/trace output
• You have done IaC deployments with Argo CD or Terraform
• You have used Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine before
• You are familiar with Tilt and have written a Kubernetes Operator before
• You are familiar with testing event-driven systems using Kafka (or even better, Redpanda)