Senior Engineer in Test - Applications

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

 

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role:

As a Senior Engineer in Test, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and executing comprehensive testing strategies for our React/TypeScript applications, along with supporting backend services where appropriate. You will work closely with software developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to identify testing requirements and build robust UI, integration, and end-to-end automated testing frameworks that ensure exceptional user experience and product quality.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in software development, a passion for quality, and deep expertise in testing modern web applications in a fast-paced, agile SaaS environment. You will serve as the subject matter expert for testing across the organization—enabling teams to upskill, adopt effective testing practices, and ramp up their automation efforts. Your leadership will help elevate our approach to frontend and full-stack quality, ensuring our products are both reliable and delightful to use.

Key Responsibilities:

Test Strategy and Planning

• Design, develop, and implement comprehensive test strategies for our React/TypeScript frontend applications and supporting services.
• Ensure strong coverage of functional and non-functional requirements in collaboration with Product Engineering teams.
• Define testing approaches for component, integration, and end-to-end user flows.
  
  

Frontend Automation Framework Development

• Build, maintain, and evolve our automated testing frameworks using tools such as Playwright, React Testing Library, and Jest/Vitest.
• Establish patterns, utilities, fixtures, and best practices that scale across multiple teams and applications.
• Integrate automated testing into CI pipelines to ensure fast, reliable feedback loops.
  
  

E2E, Integration, and UI Testing

• Develop robust automated E2E test suites for core user journeys, error paths, authentication flows, and complex UIs.
• Improve reliability, consistency, and speed of UI tests by refining mocking strategies, API stubbing, and data setup.
• Ensure cross-browser and cross-device test coverage when relevant.
  
  

API & Contract Testing

• Implement and maintain API integration tests used by frontend applications.
• Collaborate with backend engineers to create and maintain contract tests for REST/gRPC when necessary.
• Validate frontend–backend interactions w