Senior Software Engineer - Platform

As a Senior Software Engineer - Platform at Alpaca, your responsibilities include influencing the architecture of our systems, designing robust brokerage solutions, implementing backend services, maintaining software quality, participating in code reviews, and troubleshooting incidents. Your role is critical in ensuring that we scale effectively while delivering quality services to our users.

Candidates for the Senior Software Engineer - Platform position at Alpaca should have at least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale with expertise in compiled imperative or functional programming languages, proficiency in SQL or relational databases, and a strong understanding of Linux systems. Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud platforms such as GCP is also essential.

A Senior Software Engineer - Platform at Alpaca should be comfortable with compiled imperative languages like Go, C, C++, or Rust, as well as functional languages such as Haskell or Elixir. Most of our critical services are developed in Go, so proficiency in it is preferred.

At Alpaca, the work environment is fully remote and globally distributed, allowing team members to work from their favorite locations. We foster a collaborative and innovative culture, and we're always eager to welcome engineers who have a passion for financial technology and want to contribute to our mission.

Alpaca supports the professional development of a Senior Software Engineer - Platform by providing access to resources for learning and growth, encouraging contributions to open source projects, and offering a creative environment where you can ideate and build innovative solutions that tackle real-world challenges.

When answering this question, emphasize specific projects where you contributed to system scaling. Discuss the tools, technologies, and architectural patterns you applied to enhance performance and reliability while addressing potential challenges faced during the process.

Discuss your methodology for identifying performance bottlenecks using profiling tools, employing caching techniques, and improving efficiency. Share concrete examples of how you have implemented such optimizations in past projects.

Express your understanding of API-first design as a focus on creating APIs that are user-friendly for developers. Share your experience with developing or using APIs and how you ensure they are robust, scalable, and maintainable.

Highlight your practices for maintaining code quality, such as code reviews, automated testing, adherence to clean code principles, and continuous integration processes. Provide examples of how these practices improved teamwork and product health.

Discuss specific message brokers you've worked with, such as RabbitMQ or Kafka. Explain how you used them in your projects, their role in managing communication between services, and how they contributed to system reliability.

Describe your hands-on experience with Kubernetes, focusing on deployment, scaling, and maintaining containerized applications. Discuss challenges you faced and how you overcame them in a cloud context, showcasing your understanding of orchestration principles.

Outline a systematic approach for troubleshooting, including reproducing the bug, using logging to gather more information, isolating the problem, and implementing a solution. Share examples of challenging bugs you've resolved in the past.

Detail your experience working with Google Cloud Platform, discussing services you utilized, pitfalls to avoid, and how you leveraged GCP's capabilities for scalability, such as load balancing and cloud storage.

Explain how you view code reviews as opportunities for learning and collaboration. Share your technique for providing constructive feedback while also being open to suggestions, ensuring a positive team dynamic.

Talk about your experience with Agile/Scrum principles, how they facilitate adaptive planning, and enhance team collaboration. Share specific outcomes from being part of agile teams and how it led to successful project deliveries.