Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.

Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for improving the automated and manual testing infrastructure at Alpaca - helping our developers quickly and reliably deliver new features.

We are looking for experienced engineers who not only understand testing best practices and CI pipelines, but also have in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes and can dig deep into application code when necessary. 

Things You Get To Do

• Develop a comprehensive testing strategy for our API surface
• Improve developer experience by standardizing tooling and infrastructure
• Coordinate with other teams to improve test coverage, reliability and speed
• Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement within the team.
• Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing user demands.

Who You Are (must-haves)

• You have 5+ years of experience as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Senior Quality Assurance Engineer. 
• You have written code in strongly typed languages before and have at least 1 year of experience with Go.
• You have built and maintained CI pipelines before - we use a mix of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build pipelines.
• You have worked with microservices before and understand the challenges they pose for building reliable integrations and end-to-end tests. You have experience designing and building automated test frameworks.
• 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 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.

Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)

• You have written code in Python or TypeScript. You have experience writing efficient Dockerfiles and building secure container images.
• You have implemented load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC) and have experience analyzing pprof/trace output.
• You have done IaC deployments with Argo CD or Terraform, or have used Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine before. You are familiar with Tilt and have written a Kubernetes Operator before.
• You are familiar with testing event-driven systems using Kafka (or even better, Redpanda).

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.

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