Staff Data Platform Engineer

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a fast-growing series B fintech company that’s raised over $120 million in funding.
Alpaca is an API-first stock and crypto platform that enables developers and businesses across the world to build trading algorithms, applications, and brokerage services.
Our globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage specialists, and is backed by a group of prominent investors and highly experienced industry angel investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Eldridge, Positive Sum, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

And, of course, we are very enthusiastic about open source contributions as well as community building.

The Alpaca Team:

We have 150+ globally distributed (remote) team members who love to work from their favorite places in the world. We have team members based in the USA, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Philippines, Nigeria, UK, and more! We love candidates who have a passion for making a global difference in financial services and technology, by impacting local communities and becoming a part of our hyper-growth company.

Your Role: We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design and develop the data management layer for our platform. 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 constantly evolving elements of the Alpaca Data Lakehouse architecture.
• 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.
• 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 technologies like Airflow and Airbyte.
• Production experience with streaming systems like Kafka.
• Exposure to infrastructure, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code (IaaC).
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems, storage, transactions, and query processing.

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
• Benefits: Health benefits start on day 1. In the US this includes Medical, Dental, Vision. In Canada, this includes supplemental health care.  Internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs.   
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
• Work with awesome hard working people, super smart and cool clients and innovative partners from around the world

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.