[Hiring] Incident Operations Commander @Alpaca

Role Description

Serve as the on-duty commander for Alpaca's most critical incidents, directing cross-functional response to restore service quickly, keeping the right people engaged and informed, and making sure every incident leaves behind something the organisation can act on.

You do not fix the outage. You make the response reliable: correct severity, the right engineers in the room, mitigation that does not stall, leaders informed in time, and follow-up work that survives the call.

Things You Get To Do

• Command incidents end to end.
• Take command from declaration to mitigation, keeping responders focused on stopping customer and partner impact as fast as possible.
• Run the bridge, keep observers out of the responders' way, and name a stall out loud when you see one.
• Classify and hold the line on severity.
• Set severity at declaration and re-check it as facts arrive.
• Engage the right people, fast.
• Identify the owning team by service, symptom and blast radius, page them, and expand the responder set the moment the first team is wrong or not enough.
• Hold the bridge, and protect the people fixing it.
• Keep engineering and technical support uninterrupted.
• Run follow-the-sun handoffs.
• Deliver warm, high-fidelity handoffs across regions.
• Close the loop, on the clock.
• Maintain the timeline of facts as the incident runs rather than reconstructing it afterwards.
• Automate the coordination away.

Qualifications

• 4+ years commanding or co-commanding high-severity incidents in a production engineering, SRE or technical operations environment.
• You direct technical responders under pressure without being the person writing the fix.
• You make and defend crisp severity and escalation decisions.
• You can read a dashboard and judge for yourself whether impact has actually stopped.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, executives and partner-facing stakeholders.
• You are comfortable holding other teams to account in the moment.
• You thrive in a follow-the-sun model with clean cross-region handoffs.
• You understand FinTech concepts and the trust stakes of API-driven financial platforms.
• You use AI tools and agentic automation to reduce manual toil and speed up response.
• You will work a regional coverage window as part of a global 24x7 Incident Commander roster.

Requirements

• Formal incident command training - ITIL, Major Incident Management or crisis management.
• Experience with modern incident management and on-call platforms.
• You have written severity rubrics, decision trees, escalation matrices, runbooks or incident playbooks.
• You have commanded in game days, tabletop exercises or incident simulations, not only in production.
• You have partnered with problem management or reliability programme functions to roadmap incident follow-ups.
• Online securities trading or capital markets experience, or another regulated, market-hours-sensitive domain.

Benefits

• 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