[Hiring] Senior DevOps Engineer @Alpaca

Role Description

As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will design, build and operate the infrastructure that lets Alpaca scale globally and run trading-critical systems with confidence. You will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions against clearly defined goals - and a real voice in shaping those goals with the team.

We are not hiring a specialist in any single tool. We are looking for a well-rounded infrastructure engineer who thinks in cloud architecture and Infrastructure-as-Code, with a genuine Platform-as-a-Product mindset: someone who measures success by how quickly and safely the rest of engineering can ship, and who treats manual toil as a bug to be engineered away. You are comfortable operating our data stores (PostgreSQL, Message Brokers) at an operator level, partnering with our SRE and database specialists on the deeper work.

• Design and evolve our cloud architecture on GCP - networking, interconnects, IAM and high-availability topology - and express it entirely as code with Terraform, following GitOps as a first principle.
• Build and own the CI/CD pipelines that plan, review, test and safely apply IaC changes - Policy-as-Code guardrails, drift detection and progressive rollout so infrastructure changes ship as confidently as application code.
• Advance Platform-as-a-Product: build self-serve capabilities and paved paths so engineers can provision what they need, through a golden path rather than a hand-off.
• Strengthen our observability stack - metrics, logs, traces and alerting across Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Alertmanager - so the platform is easy to run and reason about.
• Operate our GKE clusters and the infrastructure services that run on them - Helm-packaged workloads, message brokers (RabbitMQ, IBM MQ) and data stores.
• Participate in our Follow-The-Sun on-call model: watch and triage alerts, join and declare incidents, lead structured debugging and escalation, and drive blameless post-mortems and the post-actions that actually close the loop.
• Embed SRE practices - SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning - into how Core Infrastructure builds and operates, working closely with our SRE function.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or SRE role, with a proven track record operating large-scale, high-availability, high-performance systems in production.
• Deep hands-on experience designing cloud architecture on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the primary cloud - landing zones, networking, IAM and high-availability topology.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code skills with Terraform, structuring large codebases across multiple environments, with GitOps as a first principle and least-privilege as a default mindset.
• Proven experience building CI/CD pipelines for IaC - automated plan/apply, code review, Policy-as-Code, drift detection and safe rollout.
• Significant production experience with Kubernetes (ideally GKE) and packaging/deploying workloads with Helm.
• Solid cloud and L3/L4-L7 networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, load balancing, DNS, TLS, interconnects) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.
• Hands-on experience with a modern observability stack - Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Alertmanager - across metrics, logs, traces and alerting.
• Operator-level familiarity with data stores such as PostgreSQL and Message Brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ, RedPanda) - able to run and troubleshoot them in production.
• A good understanding of SRE practices - SLOs/error budgets, capacity planning - and a Platform-as-a-Product mindset.
• Strong grasp of incident management end to end: joining and declaring incidents, structured debugging under pressure, escalation, clear documentation, and post-mortems that drive real change.
• Able and willing to take part in a Follow-The-Sun on-call rotation from APAC hours, and to work effectively in a distributed, async-first team with strong written communication.

Requirements

• Policy-as-code and IaC quality tooling (OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tflint, Atlantis, or similar).
• Experience managing Terraform state, module registries and versioning at scale across many teams.
• Experience building self-serve developer platforms and internal golden paths (e.g. with Backstage, Tilt, or similar).
• Experience with the Alloy collector and with incident tooling such as Rootly.
• Working proficiency in Go for automation and tooling.
• Strong Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) and container (Docker/containerd) fundamentals.
• Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).
• Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains, and with low-latency systems.

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