Incident Operations Lead (EMEA/AMER)
Alpaca · New York, NY · 1 mo ago
RemoteRemoteManufacturing$400/hrFull-time
We need to output HTML fragment with sections: About the role? Actually the posting includes "Who We Are", "Our Team Members", "Role", "Things You Get To Do", "Who You Are (Must-Haves)", "Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)", "How We Take Care of You". We need to map to allowed headings: About the role, Responsibilities, Requirements, Qualifications, Skills, Benefits, Pay, Schedule. We must only include sections when posting has real specific content. We should not repeat job title. No Job ID etc. Remove boilerplate like equal opportunity etc.
We need to decide which sections to include.
We have content about role responsibilities: "Role Lead the team..." and "Things You Get To Do" which are responsibilities. Could map to "Responsibilities". Also "Who You Are (Must-Haves)" and "Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)" map to "Requirements" or "Qualifications". Could combine. "How We Take Care of You" includes benefits: Competitive Salary & Stock Options, Health Benefits, New Hire Home-Office Setup, Monthly Stipend. That's benefits. Also maybe Pay? It mentions Competitive Salary & Stock Options but not specific numbers. Should we include Pay? The rule: never create Pay/Schedule/Benefits sections unless posting actually states them. It does state Competitive Salary & Stock Options (but not a number). Is that considered stating? It says "Competitive Salary & Stock Options" - that is a statement about pay but not a specific figure. The rule says never emit a heading followed by filler/placeholder text (e.g., "commensurate with experience", "not specified", "N/A", "varies", "TBD"). "Competitive Salary & Stock Options" is vague but not exactly placeholder like "commensurate with experience"? It's similar to vague. Might be considered filler. Safer to not create Pay section. Benefits we have concrete items: Health Benefits, New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500, Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card. Those are specific. So we can include Benefits section.
Schedule: not mentioned. So omit.
We need About the role? Could include a short paragraph summarizing role from "Who We Are" and "Our Team Members"? But About the role heading is for role description. We have "Role Lead the team..." which is role description. Could put that under About the role? But we also have Responsibilities section for duties. The instruction: Use for section headings (e.g. About the role, Responsibilities, Requirements, Qualifications, Skills, Benefits, Pay, Schedule). So we can choose which headings to use. We need to avoid duplication. Perhaps we can have About the role (short description), Responsibilities (list), Requirements (must-haves), Qualifications (nice-to-haves), Benefits (list). Or combine Requirements and Qualifications? The instruction says prefer a few substantive sections over many thin ones. So maybe we combine Must-Haves and Nice-to-Haves into one Requirements section. But we could also have Requirements and Qualifications separate if both have content. However they'd be thin? Might be okay.
Let's decide: About the role: brief paragraph summarizing mission and role. Responsibilities: bullet list from "Things You Get To Do". Requirements: bullet list from "Who You Are (Must-Haves)". Qualifications: bullet list from "Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)". Benefits: bullet list from "How We Take Care of You". Avoid Pay and Schedule.
We must preserve all substantive information, not invent or summarize away detail. So we need to keep details like specifics: "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." etc. We need to keep all those details.
We must not include boilerplate like "Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace..." etc. Also remove "Recruitment Privacy Policy". Also remove "Who We Are" maybe we can incorporate into About the role? But we must not repeat job title as heading. The page already shows it, but we can still have About the role heading.
We need to output only HTML fragment, no /, no markdown.
Let's craft.
Structure:
for section headings (e.g. About the role, Responsibilities, Requirements, Qualifications, Skills, Benefits, Pay, Schedule). So we can choose which headings to use. We need to avoid duplication. Perhaps we can have About the role (short description), Responsibilities (list), Requirements (must-haves), Qualifications (nice-to-haves), Benefits (list). Or combine Requirements and Qualifications? The instruction says prefer a few substantive sections over many thin ones. So maybe we combine Must-Haves and Nice-to-Haves into one Requirements section. But we could also have Requirements and Qualifications separate if both have content. However they'd be thin? Might be okay.
Let's decide: About the role: brief paragraph summarizing mission and role. Responsibilities: bullet list from "Things You Get To Do". Requirements: bullet list from "Who You Are (Must-Haves)". Qualifications: bullet list from "Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)". Benefits: bullet list from "How We Take Care of You". Avoid Pay and Schedule.
We must preserve all substantive information, not invent or summarize away detail. So we need to keep details like specifics: "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." etc. We need to keep all those details.
We must not include boilerplate like "Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace..." etc. Also remove "Recruitment Privacy Policy". Also remove "Who We Are" maybe we can incorporate into About the role? But we must not repeat job title as heading. The page already shows it, but we can still have About the role heading.
We need to output only HTML fragment, no /, no markdown.
Let's craft.
Structure:
About the role
Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. As a licensed financial services company serving hundreds of institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, Alpaca’s team of 400+ engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals works to open financial services to everyone. In this role you will lead the team that commands Alpaca's most critical incidents, building and continuously improving the incident command function.
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 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; ensure severity model maps onto reporting thresholds.
- Own the escalation path and thresholds for taking an incident to engineering leadership; keep the service catalogue and its ownership current.
- Own both bridges: connect engineers/technical support fixing the problem with partner communications teams needing a continuous and accurate feed; open the channel, supply facts, hold update cadence.
- After incidents, run retrospectives with SRE, build post‑incident package while the room is still warm, ticket every item, own and tag, deliver inside a defined service level before reliability programme management drives closure.
- Synthesize discussion into short, digestible learnings and publish them to the engineering organisation.
- Own KPIs: time to respond and time to mitigate end‑to‑end, including definitions and data hygiene; establish defensible baseline before committing to targets, then move them by severity; report overdue reviews by team and incident with a next action.
- Build it as a product, then automate it with AI: document, version, deploy artefacts; design AI workflows and agents that set up incidents, assemble timelines, draft RCA and action package, chase updates or overdue reviews; define what agents may do unsupervised vs. what needs commander judgement.
Requirements
- Have stood up an incident command or major‑incident function, not only worked inside one — owned the severity model, built the roster and driven adoption across teams.
- 5+ years in production engineering, SRE or technical operations, including hands‑on command of high‑severity incidents.
- Have led a distributed team across time zones and run a 24x7 rotation.
- Get engineers you do not manage to do things, and can defend a severity call to someone who disagrees.
- Have built reliability metrics people trust, and know the difference between improving a number and improving reality.
- Be disciplined about scope: able to say “that is not ours” and route it in the middle of an outage without leaving a gap.
- Write well enough that process documents actually get used; can hold a bridge calm under pressure; can brief an executive mid‑incident without downplaying or dramatizing.
- Understand FinTech and the trust stakes of API‑driven financial platforms.
- Use AI and agentic automation to remove toil rather than to add tooling.
Qualifications
- Formal incident command training – ITIL, Major Incident Management or crisis management.
- Have run a certification, game day or drill programme, or built a pool of certified responders beyond your own headcount.
- Experience with modern incident management and on‑call platforms.
- Have built a service catalogue or ownership registry that people actually maintained.
- Have worked with programme management or reliability functions to convert incident follow‑ups into funded roadmap work.
- 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.
- Have deployed the same operating model into a second region or entity.
Benefits
- 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