From the listing
About the role
As a Site Reliability Engineer at Alpaca, you'll help keep our brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we grow. You will work across our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer.
We're especially interested in candidates with strong PostgreSQL fundamentals who'd like to grow into deeper ownership of our database reliability posture. PostgreSQL sits on the trading-critical path, and we want this person to spend a meaningful share of their time leveling it up while still being a well-rounded SRE.
What you'll do
- Operate production day-to-day including oncall, incident response, postmortems, and follow-ups.
- Own reliability practice by defining and refining SLIs/SLOs and error budgets.
- Strengthen observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
- Ship infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow for cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads.
- Look after PostgreSQL performance tuning, schema and migration review, online migrations, HA/DR, and CDC pipelines.
- Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through code review, design review, and pairing.
What they're looking for
- 4+ years in SRE, DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or backend engineering with significant production operations ownership.
- Hands-on experience operating production services on Kubernetes.
- Experience shipping infrastructure as code in a GitOps workflow.
- Solid working knowledge of PostgreSQL in production including query plans, indexing, and safe online migrations.
- Cloud networking fundamentals including VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, and TLS.
- Comfortable with a modern observability stack and proficient with Linux at the operator level.
- Practiced in incident response with structured debugging and postmortems.
- Working proficiency in Go or Python.
- Strong written and verbal communication.
- Genuine interest in databases and in growing PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.
Nice to have
- Experience with large clusters at OLTP load, connection pooling at scale, or HA/DR ownership.
- Experience with typed SQL access layers in Go such as pgx, gorm, or sqlc.
- Production experience with messaging systems at scale like RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Redpanda.
- Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment including SOC 2 and secrets management.
- Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.
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."