[Hiring] Incident Operations Lead @Alpaca

Role Description

Lead the team that commands Alpaca's most critical incidents. You will build the function and then keep raising its bar: the severity model, the escalation and communication paths, 24x7 follow-the-sun coverage, and the KPIs that prove it is improving. You will do that across boundaries - with the engineering teams who own the services, with SRE on reliability standards and on-call readiness, with Risk on financial and regulatory materiality, with our partner communications teams on what reaches a customer, and with reliability programme management on what happens after.

You will own how well we respond. Not the fix, not the partner communication, and not the reliability standard. Holding that line is a deliberate part of the design and a core part of the job.

Things You Get To Do

• Build the team and stand up 24x7 command.
• Recruit and certify Incident Commanders, build a follow-the-sun rotation across APAC, EMEA and AMER with warm handoffs at every regional boundary, and carry a rostered slot yourself.
• Keep the team sharp between real incidents with game days, tabletop exercises and simulations, and coach them through the live ones.
• Build a blameless review culture that treats an outlier as a process gap rather than a person's failure.
• Drive severity maturity with Risk on financial and regulatory materiality.
• Own the escalation path and what happens when a page goes unanswered.
• Agree the thresholds for taking an incident to engineering leadership.
• Keep the service catalogue and its ownership current.
• Your team connects the engineers and technical support fixing the problem to the partner communications teams.
• Open the channel, supply the facts and hold the update cadence to account.
• Run the retrospective with SRE and build the post-incident package.
• Synthesize the discussion into short, digestible learnings and publish them to the whole engineering organisation.
• Establish a defensible baseline before committing to targets, then move them by severity.
• Report overdue reviews by team and incident with a next action against each.
• Document, version, and deploy the process to scale considerably faster than the team.
• Own the roadmap for AI workflows and agents.

Qualifications

• You have stood up an incident command or major-incident function.
• 5+ years in production engineering, SRE or technical operations, including hands-on command of high-severity incidents.
• You have led a distributed team across time zones and run a 24x7 rotation.
• You get engineers you do not manage to do things.
• You have built reliability metrics people trust.
• You are disciplined about scope.
• You write well enough that your process documents actually get used.
• You can hold a bridge calm under pressure.
• You understand FinTech and the trust stakes of API-driven financial platforms.
• You use AI and agentic automation to remove toil rather than to add tooling.

Requirements

• Formal incident command training - ITIL, Major Incident Management or crisis management.
• You have run a certification, game day or drill programme.
• Experience with modern incident management and on-call platforms.
• You have built a service catalogue or ownership registry that people actually maintained.
• You have worked with programme management or reliability functions to convert incident follow-ups into funded roadmap work.
• Familiarity with incident reporting obligations in regulated financial services - DORA, Reg SCI, FINRA or equivalent.
• Online securities trading or capital markets experience, or another regulated, market-hours-sensitive domain.
• You have deployed the same operating model into a second region or entity.

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