Senior Software Development Engineer in Test at Alpaca

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>Who We Are:</strong></p> <p>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&nbsp;<a href="https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-raises-150-million-at-a-1-15b-valuation-to-build-the-global-standard-for-brokerage-infrastructure/">recent Series D funding round</a> brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of&nbsp;<strong>opening financial services to everyone on the planet</strong>. 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Our Team Members:</strong></p> <p>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!<br><br>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.</p></div><h4>Your Role</h4> <p>As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test on the Platform Team, you will be responsible for improving the automated and manual testing infrastructure at Alpaca - helping our developers quickly and reliably deliver new features.</p> <p>We are looking for experienced engineers who not only understand testing best practices and CI pipelines, but also have in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes and can dig deep into application code when necessary.&nbsp;</p> <h4>Things You Get To Do</h4> <ul> <li>Develop a comprehensive testing strategy for our API surface</li> <li>Improve developer experience by standardizing tooling and infrastructure</li> <li>Coordinate with other teams to improve test coverage, reliability and speed</li> <li>Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement within the team.</li> <li>Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing user demands.</li> </ul> <h4>Who You Are (must-haves)</h4> <ul> <li>You have&nbsp;<strong>5+ years of experience</strong> as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Senior Quality Assurance Engineer.&nbsp;</li> <li>You have written code in strongly typed languages before<strong>&nbsp;and have at least&nbsp;<strong>1</strong>&nbsp;year of experience with Go</strong>.</li> <li>You have built and maintained <strong>CI pipelines</strong> before - we use a mix of <strong>GitHub Actions</strong> and <strong>Google Cloud Build</strong> pipelines.</li> <li>You have worked with <strong>microservices</strong> before and understand the challenges they pose for building reliable integrations and end-to-end tests. You have experience <strong>designing and building automated test frameworks</strong>.</li> <li>You are familiar with <strong>Kubernetes</strong> beyond the basics - you can write a <strong>Helm</strong> chart for a new service with relative ease, you understand best practices around security, and you have prior job experience or certifications to prove this.</li> <li>You have worked at a <strong>startup</strong> before - you understand that things don’t always go according to plan, that there is significant technical debt, that some tasks just need to be done, and that sometimes there are no processes or documentation to guide your hand.</li> <li>You are not afraid of <strong>taking a task from start to finish</strong> - gathering requirements, figuring out and implementing the best technical solution, then deploying and monitoring the results.</li> </ul> <h4>Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)</h4> <ul> <li>You have written code in <strong>Python</strong> or <strong>TypeScript</strong>. You have experience writing efficient <strong>Dockerfiles</strong> and building secure container images.</li> <li>You have implemented load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC) and have experience analyzing pprof/trace output.</li> <li>You have done IaC deployments with <strong>Argo CD</strong> or <strong>Terraform</strong>, or have used <strong>Google Cloud Platform</strong> and <strong>Google Kubernetes Engine</strong> before. You are familiar with <strong>Tilt</strong> and have written a <strong>Kubernetes Operator</strong> before.</li> <li>You are familiar with&nbsp;<strong>testing event-driven systems</strong> using Kafka (or even better, Redpanda).</li> </ul><div class="content-conclusion"><h3><strong>How We Take Care of You:</strong></h3> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Competitive Salary &amp; Stock Options</span></li> <li style="text-align: justify;">Health Benefits</li> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card</span></li> </ul> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.<br></span></em></p> <p><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><a href="https://files.alpaca.markets/disclosures/AlpacaRecruitmentPrivacyPolicy.pdf"><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recruitment Privacy Policy</span></em></a></span></p></div>