Site Reliability Engineer
Job Description
Alpaca is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer at Alpaca who will help keep their brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we grow – working across our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer.
Key Responsibilities
- Operate production day-to-day – oncall, incident response, postmortems, and the follow-ups that actually close the loop.
- Own reliability practice – define and refine SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, and help product teams live within them.
- Strengthen our observability across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
- Ship infrastructure through code in a GitOps workflow – cloud resources and Kubernetes workloads alike.
- Look after PostgreSQL: performance tuning, schema and migration review, online migrations on large tables, HA/DR, and CDC pipelines.
- Mentor engineers on reliability and database fundamentals through code review, design review, and pairing.
Key Requirements
- 4+ years 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 — query plans, pg_stat_*, indexing and schema trade-offs, and what a safe online migration looks like on a non-trivial table.
- Cloud networking fundamentals (VPCs, routing, L4/L7 load balancing, DNS, TLS) and comfort debugging cross-service connectivity.
- Comfortable with a modern observability stack and proficient with Linux at the operator level.
- Practiced in incident response – calm under pressure, structured debugging, postmortems that drive change.
- At least working proficiency in Go or Python, plus strong written and verbal communication.
- Genuine interest in databases and in growing your PostgreSQL/DBA expertise.
