Incident Operations Commander

Job description

About this role

Who We Are: 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.

Responsibilities

• - 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.
• - Classify and hold the line on severity. Set severity at declaration and re-check it as facts arrive. Risk advises on financial and regulatory materiality; the call is yours.
• - 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.
• - Run follow-the-sun handoffs. Deliver warm, high-fidelity handoffs across regions: current impact and severity, mitigation path and next actions, who is in the room, outstanding decisions, and what must not be dropped. The incoming commander confirms ownership before you step away - command never goes dark at a region boundary.

Qualifications and requirements

• - 4+ years commanding or co-commanding high-severity incidents in a production engineering, SRE or technical operations environment.
• - You direct technical responders under pressure without being the person writing the fix.
• - You make and defend crisp severity and escalation decisions, and you take charge without waiting to be asked. Command means waking senior people at 03:00, interrupting an executive, and telling an experienced engineer to stop what they are doing - with an audience watching. It is a visible, directive role and it needs to be instinctive.
• - You can read a dashboard and judge for yourself whether impact has actually stopped.
• - 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.