Senior Software Engineer - Platform

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US California headquartered brokerage infrastructure technology company and self-clearing broker-dealer, delivering execution and custody solutions for Stocks, ETFs, Options, Cryptocurrencies, and more, and has raised over $170 million in funding. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company in multiple countries, and we serve hundreds of financial institutions globally such as broker-dealers, investment advisors, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team members bring in diverse experiences such as engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals to achieve our Mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We are also deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community. We will continue to enhance and improve our award-winning developer-friendly API and the infrastructure behind it.

Our Team Members:

We’re a team of 150+ globally distributed members who love working from our favorite places worldwide. Our team spans the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and more!

We’re looking for candidates eager to join Alpaca’s growing organization, who are excited about our Mission of “Open financial services to everyone on the planet and share our Values of “Stay Curious,” “Have Empathy,” and “Be Accountable.”

Your Role:

As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.

The platform team is responsible for improving Alpaca's overall internal architecture and overseeing the public API’s structure. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer-first API and tasked with building, ideating, experimenting, and productionize new services, internal tooling and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly,  

We are looking for senior or staff+ engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions. This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX, such as operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.

Things You Get To Do:

• Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s systems
• Design a highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage system.
• Obsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)
• Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matter.
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

 Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (ex: Go, C, C++, Rust, Zig) or functional languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, Scala). Most of our critical services are written in Go
• SQL or relational database skills
• Familiarity with message brokers and message queues
• Proficient with Linux/BSD, shell scripting. 
• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
• Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• A passion for financial markets

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Knowledge of microservice architectures
• Knowledge of clean code principles
• DevOps mindset is an asset
• Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering, TCP/UDP)
• Experience with distributed Key Value stores
• Experience with CI/CD
• A passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
• Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
• Knowledge of eBPF 

How We Take Care of You:

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Benefits: Health benefits start on day 1. In the US this includes Medical, Dental, Vision. In Canada, this includes supplemental health care.  Internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs.   
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
• Work with awesome hard working people, super smart and cool clients and innovative partners from around the world

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