Senior DevOps Engineer

As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will design, build and operate the platforms behind software delivery, edge and L7 networking, platform access, and the application-facing parts of our observability stack. Alpaca is expanding fast and our needs grow with it, so we run a follow-the-sun model that keeps those systems covered around the clock. This role is the team's presence in its own region: supporting and owning that platform in your timezone.

While we are not looking for a specialist in a single tool, deep expertise in one of the tools we use alongside a broad skillset would be an advantage. What we care about most is judgement: thinking in terms of delivery and the request path, understanding business priorities and the pressure that comes with fast growth, and carrying a piece of work across quarters to a high standard without needing supervision. The engineers who do well here choose the simple solution over the easy one, even when the simple one takes longer to find.

Things You Get To Do

• Help the engineers who build on our platform: troubleshoot problems across the stack, advise teams on how to use what we run, and take your share of the support rotation during your region's hours.
• Participate in our Follow-The-Sun on-call model: watch and triage alerts, join and declare incidents, lead structured debugging and escalation, and drive blameless post-mortems and the post-actions that actually close the loop.
• Own the path a change takes to production - GitHub Actions into Argo CD, with Helm underneath - and the release tooling that has to work across multiple clusters and regions.
• Run high-traffic edge and API gateway infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of requests a day globally, where performance, availability and safe change all matter at once.
• Operates the internal tooling the rest of engineering depends on - Grafana, Sentry, Teleport, Metabase, Atlantis and others - as production services with real users rather than one-off installations.
• Advance Platform-as-a-Product: build self-serve capabilities and paved paths so engineers can get what they need through a golden path rather than a hand-off, measured by how quickly and safely the rest of engineering can ship.
• Take improvement projects end to end, from a problem nobody has framed yet through to something running in production that other teams rely on.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 5+ years in a DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or SRE role, with a proven track record operating large-scale, high-availability, high-performance systems in production.
• A track record of carrying multi-quarter platform work end to end in a complex environment running multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Deep production Kubernetes experience across multiple clusters - upgrades, debugging and day-to-day operational ownership - including packaging and deploying workloads with Helm.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code skills with Terraform, structuring codebases across multiple environments, with GitOps as a first principle and least-privilege as a default mindset.
• Proven experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines at scale, for example with GitHub Actions, including releases that deploy to multiple production locations rather than only promoting through environments.
• GitOps continuous delivery with Argo CD, or a comparable tool you can transfer from.
• Working production experience on Google Cloud, ideally GKE. You do not need to have designed landing zones or cloud topology, but you should be fluent operating on GCP day to day.
• Solid L7 networking fundamentals - load balancing, DNS, TLS and HTTP routing - and comfort debugging the request path from edge to workload.
• A Platform-as-a-Product mindset, treating what the team runs as products with real users rather than internal installations.
• Able and willing to take part in a Follow-The-Sun on-call rotation from APAC or EMEA hours, and to work effectively in a distributed, async-first team with strong written communication.

Who You Might Be (Bonus Points)

You can succeed in this role without all of the below, but any of these will help you ramp faster:

• Policy-as-code and IaC quality tooling (OPA/Conftest, Checkov, tflint, Atlantis, or similar).
• Experience managing Terraform state, module registries and versioning at scale across many teams.
• Running secret management at scale (HashiCorp Vault, OpenBao, or similar) as a service other teams depend on.
• Internal PKI and certificate lifecycle management (private CAs, issuance and rotation, mTLS between services).
• Experience building self-serve developer platforms and internal golden paths (e.g. with Backstage, Tilt, or similar).
• Production experience on Azure alongside GCP.
• Working proficiency in Go for automation and tooling.
• Strong Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) and container (Docker/containerd) fundamentals.
• Security and compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, audit logging).
• Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.