Incident Operations Lead (EMEA/AMER)

About the Position

Incident Operations Lead (EMEA/AMER)

Remote - (EMEA/AMER)

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About the Company

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. 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, totalling over 10 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.

Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

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Responsibilities

• Build the team and stand up 24x7 command. Recruit and certify Incident Commanders, build a follow-the-sun rotation across APAC, EMEA, and AMER with warm handoffs at every regional boundary, and carry a rostered slot yourself. Keep the team sharp between real incidents with game days, tabletop exercises and simulations, and coach them through the live ones. Build a blameless review culture that treats an outlier as a process gap rather than a person's failure.
• Own the process, and keep raising it. Drive severity maturity with Risk on financial and regulatory materiality. Own the escalation path and what happens when a page goes unanswered, agree the thresholds for taking an incident to engineering leadership, and keep the service catalogue and its ownership current.
• Own both bridges. Your team connects the engineers and technical support fixing the problem to the partner communications teams. Open the channel, supply the facts, and hold the update cadence to account. Afterwards, your team runs the retrospective with SRE and builds the post-incident package while the room is still warm.
• Own the KPIs. Time to respond and time to mitigate end to end, including the definitions and data hygiene beneath them. Establish a defensible baseline before committing to targets, then move them by severity.
• Build it as a product, then automate it with AI. Everything is documented, versioned, and deployable, so you can stand up command from the artefacts alone. The automation we are after is AI workflows and agents rather than scripts and dashboards.

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Requirements

• Must-Haves

  • You have stood up an incident command or major-incident function.
  • 5+ years in production engineering, SRE, or technical operations, including hands-on command of high-severity incidents.
  • You have led a distributed team across time zones and run a 24x7 rotation.
  • You get engineers you do not manage to do things, and you can defend a severity call to someone who disagrees with it.
  • You have built reliability metrics people trust, and you know the difference between improving a number and improving reality.
  • You are disciplined about scope. You can say "that is not ours" and route it, in the middle of an outage, without leaving a gap.
  • You write well enough that your process documents actually get used, you can hold a bridge calm under pressure, and you can brief an executive mid-incident without either downplaying it or dramatising it.
  • You understand FinTech and the trust stakes of API-driven financial platforms.
  • You use AI and agentic automation to remove toil rather than to add tooling.

• Nice-to-Haves

  • Formal incident command training - ITIL, Major Incident Management, or crisis management.
  • Experience with modern incident management and on-call platforms.
  • You have built a service catalogue or ownership registry that people actually maintained.
  • Familiarity with incident reporting obligations in regulated financial services - DORA, Reg SCI, FINRA, or equivalent.
  • Online securities trading or capital markets experience, or another regulated, market-hours-sensitive domain.
  • You have deployed the same operating model into a second region or entity.

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We Offer

• 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 proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

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