Senior Site Reliability Engineer

The role

You will keep the brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable. You will work across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability, messaging, and data layers with a focus on PostgreSQL.

What you will do

• Operate production day-to-day including oncall, incident response, and postmortems.
• Define and refine SLIs/SLOs and error budgets.
• Strengthen observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
• Ship infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow.
• Look after PostgreSQL including performance tuning, schema and migration review, HA/DR, and CDC pipelines.
• Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals.

Required qualifications

• 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.
• Cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, TLS).
• Comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.
• Proficient with Linux at the operator level.
• Proficient with a modern observability stack.
• Practiced in incident response.
• At least working proficiency in Go or Python.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Genuine interest in databases and in growing your PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.

Nice to have

• Deeper PostgreSQL experience: large clusters at OLTP load, online migrations on big tables, HA/DR ownership, connection pooling at scale, or change-data-capture pipelines.
• Experience with typed SQL access layers in Go (e.g. pgx, gorm, sqlc).
• Production experience with messaging systems at scale (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda).
• Security & compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).
• Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.

Benefits

• 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

About the company

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. The company serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries.