About the role

What will you do at Alpaca?

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 D funding round

[https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-raises-150-million-at-a-1-15b-valuation-to-build-the-global-standard-for-brokerage-infrastructure/]

brought our total investment to over $320 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 9 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 380+ 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: We are seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to design and develop

the data management layer for our platform to ensure its scalability as we

expand to larger customers and new jurisdictions. At Alpaca, data engineering

encompasses financial transactions, customer data, API logs, system metrics,

augmented data, and third-party systems that impact decision-making for both

internal and external users. We process hundreds of millions of events daily,

with this number growing as we onboard new customers.

We prioritize open-source solutions in our data management approach, leveraging

a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) foundation for our data infrastructure. This

includes batch/stream ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers for BI,

internal use, and external third-party sinks. Additionally, we oversee data

experimentation, cataloging, and monitoring and alerting systems.

Our team is 100% distributed and remote.

Responsibilities

* Design and oversee key forward- and reverse-ETL patterns to deliver data to
relevant stakeholders.
* Develop scalable patterns in the transformation layer to ensure repeatable
integrations with BI tools across various business verticals.
* Expand and maintain the Alpaca Data Lakehouse architecture's constantly
evolving elements.
* Collaborate closely with sales, marketing, product, and operations teams to
address key data flow needs.
* Operate the system and manage production issues in a timely manner.
Must-Haves:
* 7+ years of experience in data engineering, including 2+ years of building
scalable, low-latency data platforms capable of handling >100M events/day.
* Proficiency in at least one programming language, with strong working
knowledge of Python and SQL.
* Experience with cloud-native technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
* Strong hands-on experience with relational database systems and object
storage implementations like Apache Iceberg.
* Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform and its various
data-related services (Composer, Dataproc, Datastream, etc.)
* Experience in building scalable transformation layers, preferably through
formalized SQL models (e.g., dbt).
* Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and adapt solutions to changing
business needs.
* Experience with ETL orchestrators / frameworks like Apache Airflow and
Airbyte.
* Production experience with streaming systems like Kafka.
* Exposure to infrastructure, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (IaaC), like
Terraform.
* Deep knowledge of distributed systems, storage, transactions, and query
processing utilizing open-source distributed query engines like Trino
(formerly PrestoSQL).
* If you're passionate about data engineering and thrive in a dynamic startup
environment, we'd love to hear from you!
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.
Recruitment Privacy Policy
[https://files.alpaca.markets/disclosures/AlpacaRecruitmentPrivacyPolicy.pdf]

Which skills does this role require?

Data EngineeringPythonSQLCloud-Native TechnologiesDockerKubernetesHelmRelational Database SystemsETL TechnologiesAirflowAirbyteStreaming SystemsKafkaInfrastructureDevOpsDistributed SystemsCloud-NativeRelational DatabaseETLStreamingData LakehouseBI ToolsGCPTerraformSparkdbtA/B Testing

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