Senior Software Engineer - Ledger

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. As a licensed financial services company, Alpaca serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team comprises diverse and experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals dedicated to opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We are committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and robust infrastructure.

Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team

We are a dynamic team of 400+ 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 beyond.

We seek 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.

Your Role

As a Senior Engineer on the Ledger Team, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca, empowering millions of users trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Ledger Team builds a modern ledger system to maintain a complete and correct view of every account's history. From a business perspective, the ledger provides a structured system for recording and aggregating transactional data, crucial for financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance. From an engineering perspective, it serves as the source of truth for many services in the Alpaca ecosystem.

We are seeking an experienced engineer obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, with proven experience architecting and building at scale. You should not be afraid of challenging conventions or voicing your opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team.

Things You Get To Do

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders, including finance, operations, and product teams, to deliver high-impact features and projects.
• Build backend systems and components with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability in mind.
• Own the delivery of high-visibility features and projects, from design to deployment.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the health of Alpaca’s systems.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• A seasoned engineer with 5+ years of experience working on systems at scale.
• Obsessed with performant, defect-free, maintainable code.
• A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset.
• A collaborator capable of creating alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
• Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems.
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go.
• Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely.
• Experience with IDLs (e.g., protobuf), RPC frameworks (e.g., gRPC), cloud platforms (e.g., GCP), and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL).

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience in the financial services or accounting industry.
• Experience with distributed systems/databases.
• Experience with event-driven systems and messaging brokers (e.g., Redpanda).
• Experience working remotely.
• Experience working at a startup.

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

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