Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 20, 2026
Full Time
Apply Now

Job Description

Company: Alpaca
Location: New York, NY
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

Alpaca is a global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. We are searching for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help keep our brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we grow. In this role, you will work across our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer, with a specialized focus on owning and leveling up our PostgreSQL reliability posture on the trading-critical path.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Operate production day-to-day including on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems, and the follow-ups that actually close the loop.
  • Own reliability practice by defining and refining SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and helping product teams live within them.
  • Strengthen observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting systems.
  • Ship infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow for both cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads.
  • Look after PostgreSQL including performance tuning, schema and migration review, online migrations on large tables, HA/DR, and Change Data Capture (CDC) pipelines.
  • Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through code reviews, design reviews, and pairing.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 4+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Platform/Infrastructure, or backend engineering with significant production operations ownership.
  • Hands-on experience operating production services on Kubernetes and shipping infrastructure as code in a GitOps workflow.
  • Solid working knowledge of PostgreSQL in production — including query plans, pg_stat_*, indexing and schema trade-offs, and safe online migration practices on non-trivial tables.
  • Cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, TLS) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.
  • Proficiency with modern observability stacks and Linux at the operator level.
  • Practiced in incident response with a calm demeanor under pressure, structured debugging skills, and experience leading postmortems that drive change.
  • Programming proficiency with at least working knowledge in Go or Python, plus strong written and verbal communication skills.
  • A genuine interest in databases and in growing your PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Deeper PostgreSQL experience: Large clusters at OLTP load, online migrations on big tables, HA/DR ownership, connection pooling at scale, or CDC 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 & Perks (if applicable)

  • 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.

Related Jobs