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. 

Things You Get To Do

• Develop a comprehensive testing strategy for our API surface
• Improve developer experience by standardizing tooling and infrastructure
• Coordinate with other teams to improve test coverage, reliability and speed
• 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.

Who You Are (must-haves)

• 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)

• You have written code in Python or TypeScript. You have experience writing efficient Dockerfiles and building secure container images.
• You have implemented load tests with k6 (REST) and ghz (gRPC) and have experience analyzing pprof/trace output.
• You have done IaC deployments with Argo CD or Terraform, or have used Google Cloud Platform and Google Kubernetes Engine before. You are familiar with Tilt and have written a Kubernetes Operator before.
• You are familiar with testing event-driven systems using Kafka (or even better, Redpanda).