Director of Platform & Infrastructure, Alpaca
Offers stock options
API for stock and crypto trading
Be an early applicant
API for stock and crypto trading
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
Offers stock options
201-500 employees
Company mission
To unlock asset management for the people by modularising the world’s asset management activities.
Role
Who you are
- 5 years of experience in a similar leadership role in engineering
- Strong ability to work independently, lead and deliver on large tasks, and collaborate with other members of the organization or external partners
- Production experience with Kubernetes, Postgres, event brokers and any of the major cloud providers’ platform services
- Proven track record of building and scaling infrastructure in cloud-native, high-growth environments (preferably in fintech, brokerage, or other regulated industries)
- Strong background in system design, observability, and incident response at scale
- Experience with event-driven architecture, security best practices, compliance frameworks, and regulatory environments relevant to financial services
- Excellent leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Ability to balance long-term strategy with hands-on technical problem solving
What the job involves
- Alpaca is looking for a Director of Platform/Infrastructure Engineering to lead the design, development, technical operations, and scaling of the company’s core infrastructure and developer platforms, ensuring they are secure, resilient, and highly available to support Alpaca’s fast-paced growth
- This role balances strategic leadership with hands-on execution, driving initiatives in cloud architecture, developer experience, CI/CD, availability, automation, security, and scalability, while fostering a culture of reliability and compliance
- You will need to collaborate closely with product engineering teams, security, broker-dealer operations, and report directly to the CT
- Escalation point on the Engineering side for high-severity incidents
- Monitor and optimize cloud spend and infrastructure costs, and manage vendor relationships
- Continuously scale and improve common infrastructure elements and platform services, which are the foundation of product services
- Lead and grow high-performing engineering teams responsible for cloud infrastructure, DevOps, site reliability and technical operations
- Oversee availability, capacity planning, and disaster recovery to ensure systems are resilient and fault-tolerant
- Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure adherence to regulatory requirements across infrastructure and operations
- Establish and monitor KPIs/SLAs for platform reliability, security, and performance
- Provide thought leadership on infrastructure strategy while being willing to dive deep into technical challenges when needed
- Improve developer experience through better tooling, workflows, and internal platforms that accelerate productivity and reduce friction
Our take
Alpaca offers a developer-first API for stock trading. It enables companies to offer short-stock trading both worldwide and competitively commission-free across various programming languages. Within one year of launch Alpaca facilitated over $1 billion in transactions.
This is impressive, but not surprising. Fintech apps that facilitate stock trading on a level previously inaccessible to retail investors are on the rise. Alpaca puts this software within reach of companies who may previously have lacked the ability or the tech to do so. However, competition is growing, both from existing competitors like Interactive Brokers and Robinhood and robustly funded startups like Galileo and DriveWealth.
Alpaca now has the funding, including a round of convertible debt financing, available to scale its offering to larger businesses, and is looking further afield to work with international customers to earn income from foreign exchange fees. Whilst competition is strong in stock-trading APIs, casting their net wide could win Alpaca a head start.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Apr 2025
$52m
SERIES C
Oct 2023
$15m
CONVERTIBLE
Total funding: $139m
Company benefits
- 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 people, clients and partners from around the world
Company HQ
Downtown, San Mateo, CA
Leadership
Hitoshi Harada
(CPO)Former Database Kernel Architect at pivotal Inc and contributor at PostgreSQL Global development Group. Graduated from Keio University.
Yoshi Yokokawa
(CEO)Co-founder of Ikkyo Technology and former Forex Trader. Former Vice-President at Nomura.
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