Director of Platform & Infrastructure

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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:

Alpaca is looking for a Director of Platform/Infrastructure Engineering to lead the design, development, technical operations, and scaling of the company's core infrastructure and developer platforms, ensuring they are secure, resilient, and highly available to support Alpaca's fast-paced growth. This role balances strategic leadership with hands-on execution, driving initiatives in cloud architecture, developer experience, CI/CD, availability, automation, security, and scalability, while fostering a culture of reliability and compliance. You will need to collaborate closely with product engineering teams, security, broker-dealer operations, and report directly to the CT

Things You Get To Do:

• Escalation point on the Engineering side for high-severity incidents
• Monitor and optimize cloud spend and infrastructure costs, and manage vendor relationships.
• Continuously scale and improve common infrastructure elements and platform services, which are the foundation of product services.
• Lead and grow high-performing engineering teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, DevOps, site reliability and technical operations.
• Oversee availability, capacity planning, and disaster recovery to ensure systems are resilient and fault-tolerant.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure adherence to regulatory requirements across infrastructure and operations.
• Establish and monitor KPIs/SLAs for platform reliability, security, and performance.
• Provide thought leadership on infrastructure strategy while being willing to dive deep into technical challenges when needed.
• Improve developer experience through better tooling, workflows, and internal platforms that accelerate productivity and reduce friction.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

The following skills are required to be successful in this role:

• 5 years of experience in a similar leadership role in engineering
• Strong ability to work independently, lead and deliver on large tasks, and collaborate with other members of the organization or external partners
• Production experience with Kubernetes, Postgres, event brokers and any of the major cloud providers' platform services
• Proven track record of building and scaling infrastructure in cloud-native, high-growth environments (preferably in fintech, brokerage, or other regulated industries).
• Strong background in system design, observability, and incident response at scale.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, security best practices, compliance frameworks, and regulatory environments relevant to financial services.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Ability to balance long-term strategy with hands-on technical problem solving.

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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