Senior DevOps Engineer

Role

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.

Things You Get To Do

• 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.

 

 

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 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.

Who You Might Be (Bonus Points)

You can succeed in this role without all of the below, but any of these will help you ramp faster:

• 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.