Key skills
Site Reliability EngineeringDevOpsPlatform EngineeringInfrastructure EngineeringBackend EngineeringProduction Operations OwnershipKubernetesGitOpsPostgreSQLCloud NetworkingLinuxIncident ResponseGoPythonCalm Under PressureSQLKafkaRabbitMQLoad BalancingCommunication
About this role
Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for various financial services. They are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to maintain and enhance the reliability of their brokerage platform, focusing on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and PostgreSQL management.
Responsibilities:
- 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
Requirements:
- 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
- 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