Your role:

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

Things You Get To Do:

• 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.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

The following skills are required to be successful in this role:

• 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.