Incident Operations Commander

Responsibilities

• 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.
• You do not fix the outage. You make the response reliable: correct severity, the right engineers in the room, mitigation that does not stall, leaders informed in time, and follow-up work that survives the call.
• Command incidents end to end. Take command from declaration to mitigation, keeping responders focused on stopping customer and partner impact as fast as possible. Run the bridge, keep observers out of the responders' way, and name a stall out loud when you see one.
• Engage the right people, fast. Identify the owning team by service, symptom and blast radius, page them, and expand the responder set the moment the first team is wrong or not enough. When a page goes unanswered, escalate - and escalate the escalation. Bring in the leaders who must make business calls: feature flags, traffic shedding, failover, freeze-or-ship.
• Hold the bridge, and protect the people fixing it. Keep engineering and technical support uninterrupted - questions from stakeholders, partners and executives come to you. Be the single source of truth to the partner communications team on impact, severity and timing: you decide when a status page update or partner contact is needed, they write and send it, and chasing a late or stale update is yours.
• Automate the coordination away. Coordination is the part of this job that should eventually belong to a machine. Every manual prompt you send - the update that is due, the question nobody answered, the partner nobody contacted - is a candidate for automation, and the direction we are heading is AI handling the routine so commanders can spend their attention on judgement. You get us there by working to the decision trees, saying where they are wrong, and being honest about which of your instincts are actually rules.
• You communicate clearly with engineers, executives and partner-facing stakeholders - and you know the difference between briefing the comms function and speaking for the company.
• Formal incident command training - ITIL, Major Incident Management or crisis management.

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