Who you are

- 4+ years of experience in software engineering, data infrastructure, or platform engineering, with demonstrated ownership of complex production systems and technical projects

- Strong understanding of distributed systems and production experience with query engines such as Trino or Presto

- Strong experience operating Kubernetes-based data infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code and deployment tools such as Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or Argo CD

- Experience designing and operating compute platforms across multiple cloud regions, balancing workload locality, peak and bursty demand, resource isolation, workload prioritization, and cost-performance trade-offs

- Hands-on experience designing and operating cloud lakehouse architectures on GCP, AWS, or Azure, including object storage, metastores, and open table formats, particularly Apache Iceberg

- Experience operating large-scale streaming and CDC systems using technologies such as Kafka, Redpanda, and Debezium

- Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience building reliable data pipelines and platform tooling using orchestration and ingestion frameworks such as Airflow and Airbyte

- Strong operational judgment and the ability to make sound technical decisions, communicate trade-offs, and work effectively through ambiguity

- Experience with semantic or metrics layers such as Cube, dbt, or Looker

- Experience deploying and operating infrastructure for AI agents

- Experience building or integrating context layers that connect structured and unstructured organizational data

- Experience with data governance and access-control frameworks such as Apache Ranger

What the job involves

- We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to help design and build the next generation of our Data Platform as we continue to scale to larger customers and recent jurisdictions

- At Alpaca,



Data Engineering encompasses financial transactions, customer data, API logs, system metrics, augmented data, and third-party systems that impact decision making for both internal and external stakeholders. We process hundreds of millions of events daily, and this number continues to grow as we onboard new customers and products

- We prioritize open-source technologies in our data stack while leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the foundation for our data infrastructure. This spans batch and stream ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers for BI/Reporting, AI/agent interfaces (MCP), and external third-party sinks

- We also oversee data experimentation, cataloging, and monitoring/alerting systems

- Design, build, and evolve the core data platform infrastructure e.g., distributed query engines, orchestration, warehousing, cataloging, and more

- Own our lakehouse infrastructure as code, managing deployments through Terraform and Ansible on Kubernetes

- Build and maintain low-latency streaming and CDC ingestion pipelines, as well as batch ingestion paths landing in Iceberg

- Develop and scale our BI landscape so downstream teams and agents get performant, self-serve access to lakehouse data

- Enforce platform reliability best practices, including monitoring and alerting, on-call rotations, incident response, maintenance windows, runbooks, and SLAs

- Partner with DevOps, Analytics Engineering, and other stakeholders to close infrastructure gaps and support new data requirements

Benefits

- Stock Options
- Health benefits from day 1 (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

- Medical, Dental, Vision

- Supplemental health care

📌 Data Platform Engineer (Canada)
🏢 Alpaca
📍 Canada