Software Engineer

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining the shared services that keep Alpaca running, including our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure and authentication and authorization systems.

We are looking for experienced developers who are not afraid to get their hands dirty with managing infrastructure. We own both client-facing and internal services, we maintain shared libraries, and we manage our own deployments. Most of our time is spent writing Go code, but we also work on Helm charts, analyze logs and metrics, manage our own deployments, and, in general, get called in to help with a large variety of tasks.

Things You Get To Do

• Maintain and improve our Redpanda-based event streaming infrastructure
• Develop the replacement for Alpaca’s aging authentication and authorization services
• Create event-driven solutions to replace batch processing all across our systems
• Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions
• Contribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems
• Work with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in general
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (must-haves)

• You have 5+ years of experience writing code in strongly-typed languages, with at least one year of experience in Go.
• You are familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics - you can write a Helm chart for a new service with relative ease, you understand best practices around security, and you have prior job experience or certifications to prove this.
• You have worked with relational databases before - we use PostgreSQL, but we are not particularly picky about this one as long as you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals.
• You have worked at a startup before - you understand that things don’t always go according to plan, that there is significant technical debt, that some tasks just need to be done, and that sometimes there are no processes or documentation to guide your hand.
• You are not afraid of taking a task from start to finish - gathering requirements, figuring out and implementing the best technical solution, then deploying and monitoring the results.
• You have worked at least 3 years on systems at scale.

Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)

• You understand how Kafka works - maybe you even worked with Redpanda before. 
• You know what a JWT token is, and how OpenID Connect and SAML work. Maybe you even heard about Keycloak, or have worked on authentication systems before.
• You have done IaC deployments with Argo CD or Terraform, or have used Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine before.
• 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 are familiar with FlatBuffers and Protocol Buffers, have written or consumed gRPC services before, and can design simple RESTful APIs.