Your Role

Build Alpaca's internal infrastructure and developer platform as a product. You own the product definition and platform maturity strategy, the intake, the backlog, and the multi-quarter roadmap for Platform & Infrastructure, and you put the rails in place so DevOps, Platform, and Infrastructure teams, and the customers know what to prioritize next. Partnering directly with the VP of Engineering.

Alpaca is building infrastructure for programmable finance at global scale: new countries, global markets, products that must stay centralized, and products that must be deployable in any region. This seat exists so that work has a product owner — platform maturity, CI/CD, cost efficiency and attribution, and the infrastructure dependencies that product engineering keeps discovering too late.

Things You Get To Do

Own infrastructure as a product. Define and evolve a platform maturity model in the open. Internal customers are Alpaca engineers. The north star matches the Platform & Infrastructure charter: self-serve infrastructure on paved golden paths – any engineer can build, ship, authenticate, observe, and scale a service without filing a ticket. You are the product owner for Foundational Infrastructure inside the TPM team: efficiency (cost attribution / chargeback) and the KPIs that prove the platform is getting easier to consume (full CI/CD delivery and adoption).

Build the rails for monthly delivery. Teams already carve capacity for on-call, support, and upgrades. What remains is discovery and delivery. You make the next pull from a living roadmap obvious. You keep the central backlog and intake sane. You surface platform and infrastructure dependencies before they become surprises on someone else's roadmap.

Drive platform maturity until maintenance windows disappear. Short term you will feel the pain of coordinating maintenance windows, runbooks, and market-hours constraints — because you cannot eliminate what you have not operated. The goal is 24/7 deployability across open and closed markets, globally. 

Make the cost a first-class product surface. Work with infrastructure engineering and Finance on attribution, chargeback, and efficiency. This requires technical judgment: you have to understand why a node, a database, or a pipeline costs what it costs. Cost is one program, not the whole job.

Raise CI/CD and developer-platform adoption. Full CI/CD delivery and adoption is a stated KPI for this seat. Partner with DevOps App (ArgoCD, service mesh, API gateway) and Platform (AuthX, event streaming, DevEx) so golden paths get used, not documented and ignored.

Make infrastructure portable for global scale. Distinguish what must stay centralized to serve all of Alpaca from what must be packaged and deployable in new markets Alpaca will expand to. 

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• 7+ years as a TPM, product manager technical, or equivalent, with a substantial portion of that time owning infrastructure, platform or developer experience.
• You have owned a multi-team backlog, intake, and roadmap, and you have run a planning cadence that teams actually use.
• You are technically fluent to be an equal partner to senior/staff engineers on compute infra, deployment pipelines (CI/CD), data stores, networking, and cost drivers. While you do not need to write production Terraform; you do need to know when a proposal is hand-wavy.
• You get things done without a reporting line. You have influenced platform adoption across many teams.
• You write and operate with crisp scope. You can say what this role does not own and still leave no gap.
• You have worked in a market-hours-sensitive or regulated production environment, or another domain where deploy windows, change risk, and customer trust are real constraints.
• You use AI and automation to remove program toil rather than add tooling.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• You have stood up a platform-maturity model, paved-path program, or internal developer platform.
• You have eliminated or dramatically reduced maintenance windows or change-freeze culture in a production org.
• Multi-region or multi-entity infrastructure: packaging a platform so a new region or booking center can be stood up without a hero project.
• Capital markets, brokerage, or other FinTech infrastructure.