Senior AI Platform Engineer

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, totaling 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.

### Your Role - Own the connector and service integration layer that powers AI workflows across the company. - Design and ship execution environments for agents and higher-autonomy AI workflows, including isolation boundaries and access controls. - Build reusable platform services, golden paths, and self-service templates that reduce setup friction for teams building on AI. - Productize onboarding so it works reliably for both developers and non-developers without depending on manual intervention or tribal knowledge. - Define and enforce technical standards for agent execution, evaluation loops, and deployment. - Partner with Security and IT to ship deployable patterns for higher-risk AI capabilities. - Own the AI governance layer: access controls, audit trails, approval criteria, and deployment boundaries for agentic workflows. - Set the reliability, observability, and operational bar for AI-specific infrastructure. - Act as the technical escalation point when onboarding or platform issues block rollout. - Reduce the company's dependence on individual heroics by turning exception handling into repeatable paths.

### Who You Are (Must-Haves) - 8+ years in software, platform, infrastructure, or adjacent engineering roles. - Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems: LLM-powered workflows, tool-calling agents, evaluation loops, or autonomous execution — using frameworks like the Claude SDK, Google Agent Development Kit (ADK), LangGraph, or similar. Not classical ML or data pipelines. - Direct experience with GCP. We run on Google Cloud and you should be comfortable there. - Strong experience with APIs, auth, OAuth, secrets, CLI tooling, and deployment patterns. - Cloud-native systems experience with containers, orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code. - Experience implementing AI governance controls: access boundaries, audit logging, approval workflows, and safe deployment standards for higher-autonomy systems. - Comfortable operating in both fast-moving, low-process environments and more structured, compliance-aware ones. You know when to move fast and when to slow down. - Strong bias toward simplification, standardization, and operational reliability over clever one-off solutions. - Excellent communication skills with the ability to work across engineering, security, and non-technical stakeholders.

### 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 a global leader in brokerage infrastructure APIs, providing access to stocks, ETFs, options, fixed income, and crypto, along with embeddable finance solutions like tokenization and securities lending. It serves retail traders, institutional investors, app developers, and fintech companies worldwide through its API-first platform. The company, originally started in 2015 as a database and machine learning firm, is headquartered in San Mateo, California.