Senior Software Engineer - Clearing

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. We are a licensed financial services company serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. Our mission is to open financial services to everyone on the planet.

We are a diverse, global team of over 400 members, thriving in a remote-first environment. We value our core principles: Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Clearing team, you will work on the critical post-trade processes essential to our brokerage operations. This includes building and enhancing systems for US equities and options clearing, securities finance, and enabling new product offerings through integrations.

What You'll Do

• Work in a team that values quality of thinking, excellence in execution, practical solutions, and accountability.
• Own projects from ideation to deployment, driving them to completion.
• Design and build new systems to enable new products and unlock revenue.
• Refine and improve existing systems for meaningful and tangible outcomes.
• Gain deep knowledge of the financial markets' essential infrastructure.
• Contribute to building and scaling a company like Alpaca, influencing our direction and processes.
• Participate in an on-call rotation, with a focus on eliminating issues that cause friction.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• A strong sense of responsibility for systems handling users' money.
• Deep interest in how traditional financial markets operate.
• Proven ability to lead projects from start to finish.
• Personal and collective accountability for your work.
• Understanding of which design choices are critical versus adjustable.
• Proactive in seeking information when you don't know something.
• Flexibility to adapt ideas based on new information.
• Desire to see the long-term impact of your decisions and take on larger efforts.
• Experience in startups, understanding the need for continuous improvement and adaptability to market needs.
• Ability to provide constructive pushback and accept differing decisions.
• Exceptional attention to detail.
• Solid foundational knowledge of computer systems, the internet, databases, and distributed systems.
• Productivity with Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building reliable and distributed systems.
• Proficiency in designing good RESTful APIs and identifying poor ones.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in securities clearing & settlement or securities finance.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, Temporal, Grafana, Kafka/Redpanda, Helm, and Docker.

How We Take Care of You

• 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