Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

• As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will own the technical direction of Alpaca’s streaming platform - our Redpanda-based event backbone and the user-facing streaming infrastructure
• Platform also owns Authentication, Developer Experience and QA, and AI-Native Engineering
• Streaming is roughly two-thirds of the job and where we expect you to become the deepest engineer in the company; across the other three you review the designs, hold an informed opinion, and lead the work where they meet streaming
• This is a Staff role, so we are hiring for direction as much as delivery - the engineer who decides what the streaming platform looks like in two years, writes the RFC that gets three teams to agree, and then builds the hard part
• We own client-facing and internal services, maintain shared libraries nearly every team depends on, and manage our own deployments
• Most of our time goes into Go, but we also write Helm charts, dig through logs and metrics, and get pulled into a wide variety of problems
• Own the architecture of our event streaming platform end to end - 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 rather than around them
• Design user-facing streaming at scale: connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering and delivery guarantees, and the failure modes that only show up on a volatile market day
• Set the standards for event-driven design - schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency - and own the shared libraries other teams build against, including the cost of versioning and deprecation
• Shape AuthN/AuthZ direction across Alpaca and lead the work where identity meets streaming: authorizing real-time subscriptions, token lifecycle on long-lived connections, multi-tenant isolation
• Help shape how Alpaca builds with AI - the schemas, contracts and event streams you own are the substrate our agentic development platform runs on
• Partner with SRE on chaos testing and game days for the event backbone, and with our QA stream on test tooling and pre-production gates, so resilience is verified rather than assumed
• Lead through influence rather than authority, and multiply the engineers around you through mentoring, design review, and handing off the work that grows people
• Join the Platform on-call rotation and act as technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure

Benefits

• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
• Work with awesome people, clients and partners from around the world
• Stock Options
• Medical, Dental, Vision
• Supplemental health care
• Health benefits from day 1 (internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs)

• You know Kubernetes beyond the basics: you can write a Helm chart with relative ease, you understand security best practices, and you have job experience or certifications to prove it
• You have built or maintained libraries many teams depend on, and know what backward compatibility and deprecation actually cost
• You have worked at a startup before - you thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, know when to balance technical debt with speed, and proactively tackle whatever needs to get done without relying on pre-existing processes or documentation
• You have architected event streaming systems, not just used them - real production depth in Kafka or Redpanda across partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention and delivery guarantees, and how each breaks under load
• 8+ years of professional engineering experience, including several years running systems at real scale. You write Go, or have deep experience in another strongly-typed language and will pick it up quickly
• You have real depth in at least one adjacent area - identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience - and genuine curiosity about the others
• You have driven technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority. You can point to the decisions you owned, the RFCs you wrote, and what happened next
• You have mentored senior engineers and left the teams around you better than you found them
• You have worked with relational databases - we use PostgreSQL, but we are not picky as long as the fundamentals are solid
• You have delivered realtime data to clients at scale (WebSockets, SSE or gRPC streaming) and handled fan-out, slow consumers and backpressure in production
• You’ve worked with an IDL or binary serialization format (Protobuf, Avro; we use FlatBuffers) and handled schema evolution across many consumers
• You have experience with change data capture (Debezium, PeerDB or similar) and understand how Postgres logical replication works
• You’ve worked on auth systems - OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak or Cognito - especially around long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access
• You’ve built agentic or AI-native developer tooling, or designed systems meant to be operated by agents rather than only by people
• You’ve run chaos engineering or game days, or built the load and fault-injection testing that makes them worth running
• You’ve done IaC with Argo CD or Terraform
• You have experience with Grafana’s observability stack - Prometheus, Tempo and all the rest. You might have even written a PromQL query for a new alert once or twice
• You’ve worked in fintech or another regulated domain and understand how compliance constraints shape architecture