Staff Software Engineer (Platform)

Join Alpaca as a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, where you will own the technical direction of our streaming platform and lead the shift from batch to event-driven systems. You will design user-facing streaming at scale, set standards for event-driven design, shape AuthN/AuthZ direction, and help shape how Alpaca builds with AI. This is a senior role that requires strong technical leadership and mentoring skills.

• Own the technical direction of Alpaca's streaming platform, including the architecture of the event streaming platform end to end.
• Lead the shift from batch to event-driven across Alpaca's systems, working with the teams who own them rather than around them.
• Set the standards for event-driven design, schema evolution, topic ownership, replay, idempotency, and own the shared libraries other teams build against.

• You know Kubernetes beyond the basics: you can write a Helm chart with relative ease, you understand security best practices, and you have job experience or certifications to prove it
• You have built or maintained libraries many teams depend on, and know what backward compatibility and deprecation actually cost
• You have worked at a startup before - you thrive in ambiguous environments, embrace changing priorities, know when to balance technical debt with speed, and proactively tackle whatever needs to get done without relying on pre-existing processes or documentation
• You have architected event streaming systems, not just used them - real production depth in Kafka or Redpanda across partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention and delivery guarantees, and how each breaks under load
• 8+ years of professional engineering experience, including several years running systems at real scale. You write Go, or have deep experience in another strongly-typed language and will pick it up quickly
• You have real depth in at least one adjacent area - identity and access, developer tooling and CI, or testing and resilience - and genuine curiosity about the others
• You have driven technical direction across team boundaries without formal authority. You can point to the decisions you owned, the RFCs you wrote, and what happened next
• You have mentored senior engineers and left the teams around you better than you found them
• You have worked with relational databases - we use PostgreSQL, but we are not picky as long as the fundamentals are solid
• You have delivered realtime data to clients at scale (WebSockets, SSE or gRPC streaming) and handled fan-out, slow consumers and backpressure in production
• You’ve worked with an IDL or binary serialization format (Protobuf, Avro; we use FlatBuffers) and handled schema evolution across many consumers
• You have experience with change data capture (Debezium, PeerDB or similar) and understand how Postgres logical replication works
• You’ve worked on auth systems - OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT lifecycle, Keycloak or Cognito - especially around long-lived connections or machine-to-machine access
• You’ve built agentic or AI-native developer tooling, or designed systems meant to be operated by agents rather than only by people
• You’ve run chaos engineering or game days, or built the load and fault-injection testing that makes them worth running
• You’ve done IaC with Argo CD or Terraform
• You have experience with Grafana’s observability stack - Prometheus, Tempo and all the rest. You might have even written a PromQL query for a new alert once or twice
• You’ve worked in fintech or another regulated domain and understand how compliance constraints shape architecture