Staff Software Engineer – Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the complete architecture and the two-to-three-year strategic direction for Alpaca’s Redpanda-based event streaming platform, UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming.

• Spearhead the shift from batch processing to event-driven systems throughout Alpaca.

• Design scalable user-facing streaming solutions, addressing connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, ordering, delivery guarantees, and failure modes.

• Set standards for event-driven design, encompassing schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, and idempotency.

• Manage shared libraries, making decisions on versioning and deprecation.

• Influence the direction of AuthN/AuthZ and lead identity-related streaming initiatives, including real-time subscription authorization, token lifecycle management, and multi-tenant isolation.

• Contribute to the development of Alpaca’s AI-native platform through schemas, contracts, and event streams.

• Collaborate with SRE on chaos testing and game days, and partner with QA on test tooling and pre-production gates.

• Lead through influence by mentoring, conducting design reviews, and delegating effectively.

• Participate in the Platform on-call rotation and act as the technical lead during shared-infrastructure incidents.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of professional engineering experience, including multiple years managing systems at significant scale.

• Proficiency in Go, or extensive experience in another strongly-typed language with a readiness to learn Go quickly.

• Expertise in architecting Kafka or Redpanda event streaming systems in production, including aspects like partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention, and delivery guarantees.

• Experience in delivering real-time data to clients at scale utilizing WebSockets, SSE, or gRPC streaming.

• Proficient in managing fan-out, slow consumers, and backpressure in a production environment.

• Proven ability to drive technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority.

• Skilled in writing RFCs and taking ownership of technical decisions.

• Experience in building or maintaining libraries utilized by multiple teams.

• Knowledgeable about backward compatibility and deprecation practices.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers.

• In-depth knowledge in at least one adjacent area: identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience.

• Advanced Kubernetes proficiency that goes beyond basic understanding, including writing Helm charts and knowledge of security best practices, supported by job experience or certifications.

• Familiarity with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.

• Prior startup experience and the capability to thrive in ambiguous, dynamic environments.

• Nice-to-have: Familiarity with IDL or binary serialization formats such as Protobuf, Avro, or FlatBuffers.

• Nice-to-have: Experience with change data capture, such as Debezium or PeerDB, and PostgreSQL logical replication.

• Nice-to-have: Knowledge of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak, or Cognito.

• Nice-to-have: Experience with agentic or AI-native developer tooling.

• Nice-to-have: Background in chaos engineering, game days, load testing, or fault-injection testing.

• Nice-to-have: Proficiency in infrastructure as code with Argo CD or Terraform.

• Nice-to-have: Familiarity with the Grafana observability stack, including Prometheus and Tempo.

• Nice-to-have: Experience in fintech or regulated domains.

🏝️ 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