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 D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 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 9 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 beyondWe'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.As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.The market data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture of Alpaca connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. Oversee their public API structure and documentation on both streaming and historical endpoints. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer-first API and is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production the new services, 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-like operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.Things You Get To Do:Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca's market data systemsDesign highly scalable, mission-critical systemsObsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience mattersMaintain good software quality and test coverageParticipate in code reviewsTroubleshooting on incidents and reported bugsYou may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in natureWho You Are (Must-Haves):At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scaleExperience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in GoSQL or relational database skillsFamiliarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networkingProficient with Linux/BSD, and shell scriptingExcited about what we are building at AlpacaProven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teamsExperience 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 marketsWho You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves): Knowledge of microservice architecturesKnowledge of clean code principlesDevOps mindset is an assetCloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)Experience in building low-latency applicationsExperience with distributed key-value storesExperience with CI/CDA passion for financial markets or the desire to learnKnowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologiesExperience with observability, tracing, continuous profilingExperience with capacity planning and benchmarkingKnowledge of eBPF
How We Take Care of You:Competitive Salary & Stock OptionsHealth BenefitsNew Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex CardAlpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.Recruitment Privacy Policy