From the listing
About the role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will build and own the frameworks, tooling, and CI/CD infrastructure that let Alpaca’s engineers ship new features quickly and reliably. This is a software engineering role at its core: you will spend most of your time writing Go, designing automated test frameworks, and digging into application code and Kubernetes when needed.
Just as importantly, you will help redefine how we use AI to raise the bar on quality - leveraging LLMs and AI-driven tooling to generate tests, catch regressions before they ship, and turn every incident into durable, automated coverage. We are looking for engineers who treat quality as an engineering discipline and see AI as a force multiplier for it.
What you'll do
- Design and build automated test frameworks across our REST and gRPC API surface.
- Leverage AI and LLM-based tooling to accelerate test generation, harden regression coverage, and turn production incidents into automated tests.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build.
- Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing demand.
- Introduce chaos engineering practices including fault-injection and resilience experiments.
- Standardize tooling and infrastructure to improve the day-to-day developer experience.
- Partner with other teams to raise test coverage, reliability, and speed across services.
- Dig into application code to root-cause failures and drive fixes to completion.
- Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years of experience as a software engineer building and maintaining production systems.
- At least 1 year of experience with Go and proficiency in strongly typed languages.
- Fluent with AI-assisted engineering and active use of LLM-based tools in workflow.
- Experience building and maintaining CI pipelines, ideally with GitHub Actions or Google Cloud Build.
- Experience designing and building automated test frameworks for microservices.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes beyond basics, including writing Helm charts and understanding security best practices.
- Prior startup experience and ability to work with technical debt or lack of documentation.
- Ability to take tasks from requirements gathering through implementation, deployment, and monitoring.
Nice to have
- Used AI/LLM tooling to build QA automation such as test generation or flaky-test triage.
- Proficiency in Python or TypeScript and ability to build efficient Dockerfiles.
- Implemented load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC) and experience analyzing pprof/trace output.
- IaC deployments with Argo CD, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform, or Google Kubernetes Engine.
- Familiarity with Tilt or experience writing a Kubernetes Operator.
- Practiced chaos engineering with tools like Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos, or Gremlin.
- Familiarity with testing event-driven systems using Kafka or Redpanda.
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."