From the listing
About the role
As a Senior Full Stack Engineer on the Platform Team, you will develop and operate Alpaca’s authentication, authorization, and Identity Provider (IdP) systems. These systems handle user login, access control, and secure access across APIs, customer products, and internal tools.
Most of your time will be spent writing Go for backend services, gRPC/REST APIs, and shared client libraries, with meaningful work in React/TypeScript for auth-related UI and occasionally Java for identity-provider extensions. You will own services end to end, including API design, data modeling, deployments, and production debugging.
What you'll do
- Build and improve authentication-related experiences in customer and partner web applications.
- Develop and maintain the platform’s authentication, authorization, and IdP services.
- Create and evolve shared libraries and SDKs.
- Integrate with identity providers and keep login and access policies working reliably.
- Deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot identity services in production.
- Modernize legacy authentication patterns as the platform evolves.
- Collaborate with other engineering teams on identity and access integration.
- Maintain high code quality, write tests, and participate in code reviews.
- Help investigate incidents and bugs, including on-call rotation.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages.
- At least one year of experience in Go.
- Experience building web applications with React and TypeScript.
- Solid grasp of relational database fundamentals (PostgreSQL).
- Experience working at a startup and thriving in ambiguous environments.
- Ability to own tasks from requirements gathering through implementation and monitoring.
- At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale.
Nice to have
- Knowledge of JWT, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
- Experience with Keycloak or authentication systems.
- Experience with role-based access control.
- Experience building or maintaining OpenAPI-driven HTTP APIs.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and Helm.
- Experience with Java.
- Understanding of Kafka or Redpanda.
- Experience with Grafana’s observability stack (Prometheus, Tempo, PromQL).
From the company page
Alpaca benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Our teams are not just global, we’re also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica).”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Alpaca
I like their clear views on the value of remote work, check out this quote from their careers page:
> "Our teams are not just global, we're also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica). By joining Alpaca you'll be part of a multicultural, international organization."
I also like that their Glassdoor scores are going up (now 3.7/5), and they have some solid testimonials. I'm a LITTLE wary of this statement that gives me a bit of a "hustle culture" vibe:
> "We're keen on that last 10% of effort and believe that the details do matter. If this sounds like you, then you're in the right place."