Senior Software Engineer - Identity

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.

Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team comprises 400+ distributed members across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. We are backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, SBI Group, and Y Combinator.

The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users trading billions of dollars in assets.

The Identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying identity, evaluating risk, and managing trading accounts. You will expand this platform globally to support growing account types while achieving high automation rates. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement robust architectures and actively participate in defining team goals.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to core backend systems relied on by millions of end users
• Design and implement a global financial identity verification and risk management platform
• Build reliable, scalable microservices and make foundational architectural decisions
• Take ownership of technical challenges proactively and propose innovative solutions
• Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering teams to streamline system interactions
• Maintain high code quality, automated test coverage, and participate in peer code reviews
• Troubleshoot production incidents and reported bugs
• Participate in an on-call rotation to support critical engineering operations

Qualifications

Must-Haves

• At least 3 years of experience building and maintaining microservices and systems at scale
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Ability to write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code
• Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven architecture
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience working with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
• Strong problem-solving skills, proactive mindset, and preference for simple, elegant solutions
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in a distributed team environment

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in the financial services or fintech industry
• Experience with financial identity verification (e.g., KYC / AML)
• Experience with messaging queues and event streaming brokers
• Experience integrating third-party external services
• Experience working remotely or within a high-growth startup environment
• Strong DevOps mindset

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Comprehensive health benefits
• USD $500 one-time home-office setup stipend
• USD $150 per month recurring stipend via Brex card