At a Glance
- Tasks: Ensure our brokerage platform runs smoothly and reliably while enhancing PostgreSQL performance.
- Company: Join Alpaca, a leading fintech company revolutionising financial services globally.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, stock options, health benefits, and a home-office setup stipend.
- Other info: Be part of a diverse global team committed to innovation and open-source contributions.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in a dynamic team while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: 4+ years in SRE or DevOps with strong PostgreSQL and Kubernetes experience.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 £ per year.
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 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.
We're a dynamic team of 380+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favourite 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.
As a Site Reliability Engineer at Alpaca, you'll help keep our brokerage platform reliable, observable, and operable as we grow—working across our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, observability stack, messaging layer, and data layer. We're especially interested in candidates with strong PostgreSQL fundamentals who'd like to grow into deeper ownership of our database reliability posture: PostgreSQL sits on the trading‑critical path, and we want this person to spend a meaningful share of their time leveling it up while still being a well‑rounded SRE the rest of the week.
Things You Get To Do
- 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.
Who You Are (must-haves)
- 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.
Who You Might Be (Nice‑to‑Haves)
- Deeper PostgreSQL experience: large clusters at OLTP load, online migrations on big tables, HA/DR ownership, connection pooling at scale, or change‑data‑capture pipelines.
- Experience with typed SQL access layers in Go (e.g., pgx, gorm, sqlc).
- Production experience with messaging systems at scale (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda).
- Security & compliance experience in a regulated environment (SOC 2, secrets management, audit logging).
- Familiarity with trading, brokerage, or other regulated fintech domains.
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.
Senior SRE - PostgreSQL Reliability & Cloud Operations employer: Alpaca
At Alpaca, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that champions a culture of curiosity, empathy, and accountability. Our global team enjoys competitive salaries, stock options, and comprehensive health benefits, alongside a supportive work environment that fosters professional growth and innovation. With the flexibility to work from anywhere and a commitment to open-source contributions, joining Alpaca means becoming part of a dynamic community dedicated to transforming financial services for everyone.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior SRE - PostgreSQL Reliability & Cloud Operations
✨Tip Number 1
Network like a pro! Reach out to current or former employees at Alpaca on LinkedIn. A friendly chat can give you insider info and maybe even a referral, which can really boost your chances.
✨Tip Number 2
Prepare for the interview by brushing up on PostgreSQL and SRE concepts. We want to see your passion and expertise shine through, so practice explaining your past experiences and how they relate to the role.
✨Tip Number 3
Show us your problem-solving skills! Be ready to tackle some real-world scenarios during the interview. Think about how you’d handle incidents or improve reliability—this is your chance to impress us with your thought process.
✨Tip Number 4
Don’t forget to apply through our website! It’s the best way to ensure your application gets seen by the right people. Plus, it shows you’re genuinely interested in joining our team at Alpaca.
We think you need these skills to ace Senior SRE - PostgreSQL Reliability & Cloud Operations
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show Your Passion:When you're writing your application, let your enthusiasm for the role shine through! We want to see that you're genuinely excited about contributing to Alpaca's mission and values.
Tailor Your Experience:Make sure to highlight your relevant experience in SRE, PostgreSQL, and cloud operations. We love seeing how your background aligns with what we're looking for, so don’t hold back on those details!
Be Clear and Concise:Keep your application straightforward and to the point. We appreciate clarity, so make sure your skills and experiences are easy to understand without any fluff.
Apply Through Our Website:We encourage you to submit your application directly through our website. It’s the best way for us to receive your info and get the ball rolling on your journey with Alpaca!
How to prepare for a job interview at Alpaca
✨Know Your PostgreSQL Inside Out
Make sure you brush up on your PostgreSQL knowledge before the interview. Be ready to discuss query plans, indexing strategies, and online migrations. They’ll want to see that you can handle performance tuning and understand schema trade-offs, so prepare some examples from your past experience.
✨Demonstrate Your SRE Skills
Since this role is all about reliability, be prepared to talk about your experience with incident response and postmortems. Share specific instances where you’ve improved reliability practices or defined SLIs/SLOs. Showing that you can stay calm under pressure will definitely impress them!
✨Familiarise Yourself with Their Tech Stack
Alpaca uses Kubernetes and a modern observability stack, so make sure you’re comfortable discussing these technologies. If you have experience with GitOps workflows, be ready to explain how you’ve shipped infrastructure as code in the past. This will show that you’re not just a fit for the role but also for their tech culture.
✨Align with Their Values
Alpaca values curiosity, empathy, and accountability. Think of examples from your career that demonstrate these traits. Whether it’s mentoring others or taking ownership of a project, showing that you align with their core values will help you stand out as a candidate who fits into their team culture.
