Alpaca - Staff Software Engineer - Platform

• 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 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. • 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 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 built or maintained libraries many teams depend on, and know what backward compatibility and deprecation actually cost. • You have mentored senior engineers and left the teams around you better than you found them. • 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 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 worked with relational databases - we use PostgreSQL, but we are not picky as long as the fundamentals are solid. • 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. • Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves) • 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. • How We Take Care of You: • Competitive Salary & Stock Options • Health Benefits • New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500 • Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card • Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. • Recruitment Privacy Policy