Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

About the role

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. As a licensed financial services company, we serve hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries, including broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 10 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We are 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.

Your Role

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. 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.

What you'll do

• Develop a comprehensive testing strategy for our API surface spanning unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests.
• Improve developer experience by standardizing tooling and infrastructure for testing across the organization.
• Coordinate with other teams to improve test coverage, reliability, and speed across the full development lifecycle.
• Mentor and guide product engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous improvement within the team.
• Design and execute load, stress, and scalability tests to ensure our platform can handle growing user demands.
• Collaborate with SRE and platform teams to enhance observability and reliability in CI pipelines and production monitoring.
• Investigate and resolve complex test failures, working directly with application code and infrastructure when needed.
• Drive the adoption of best practices for testing microservices, including contract testing, schema validation, and integration test patterns.
• Contribute to open-source testing tools and internal frameworks that empower Alpaca's developer-first approach.
• Partner with security and compliance stakeholders to ensure tests validate regulatory and operational requirements.

Requirements

• You have 5+ years of experience as a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) or Senior Quality Assurance Engineer.
• You have written code in strongly typed languages before and have at least 1 year of experience with Go.
• You have built and maintained CI pipelines before - we use a mix of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build pipelines.
• You have worked with microservices before and understand the challenges they pose for building reliable integrations and end-to-end tests.
• You have experience designing and building automated test frameworks.
• You are familiar with Kubernetes beyond the basics - you can write a Helm 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.
• You have worked at a startup 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.
• You are not afraid of taking a task from start to finish - gathering requirements, figuring out and implementing the best technical solution, then deploying and monitoring the results.

Who You Might Be (nice-to-haves)

• Experience contributing to or building open-source testing frameworks or libraries.
• Familiarity with financial services testing requirements, including regulatory and compliance considerations.
• Background in high-frequency trading or low-latency systems.
• Contributions to the Alpaca community or public-facing developer tools.

Practical notes

This role is fully remote and available to Global Anywhere. The engagement model follows the source documentation, and no additional hours, travel, visa, or deadline constraints are specified beyond those stated.