Lead Software Engineer - Platform

Job Description

Your Role

As a Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading a talented group of software engineers in designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.

Your job is to be the tech lead engineer of the platform team. In this role, you will design and architect our platform by wearing many different hats on our small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our internal engineering teams and customers.

On the platform team, you will write well-structured applications in Go with testing and observability in mind (exposing metrics that can be visualized and used for alerts). You will containerize these into optimized Docker images and design helm charts for deploying to Kubernetes. 

You are the ideal candidate if you are a native speaker of K8S, Golang, and Docker and have extensive, hands-on experience with microservices and event-driven architecture. You would be even more awesome if you developed Kafka consumers/producers.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

  • Kubernetes experience
    • deep understanding of K8S objects and cloud-native application development
    • written Helm charts
  • Docker experience
    • written highly optimized Dockerfiles
  • Golang experience (or other modern compiled statically typed languages):
    • concurrent programming
    • writes well-structured / good abstraction / "object-oriented" code
    • writes well-covered code (unit/integration/e2e tests)
  • experience with relational databases (Postgres)
    • with a focus on optimized queries on huge tables
  • tech-lead and team-lead experience

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

  • Has a black-belt in Kubernetes:
    • CKA/CKAD
    • have written Kubernetes operators
    • Tilt experience
  • developer experience with Kafka/Redpanda
    • created producers and consumers
  • have used message serialization technologies
    • Protobuf
    • Flatbuffer
  • experience in various observability tools
    • Prometheus
    • Alertmanager
    • Grafana
    • Loki
  • knowledge in algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability and concurrency control
  • DevOps mindset (understanding of CI pipelines release procedures)
  • understanding of equity/crypto trading