Senior Software Engineer - Market Data

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, including broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling 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 deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and robust infrastructure.

Alpaca is proudly 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'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.

The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca, empowering millions of users 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. You will oversee their public API structure and documentation on both streaming and historical endpoints. The team is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production new services and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly, building a cohesive developer-first API.

We are looking for senior or staff engineers keen on providing quality solutions, possessing great fundamentals, proven experience building and architecting at scale, and 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 systems
• Design highly scalable, mission-critical systems
• 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
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with timely engineering projects

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g., Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in Go.
• SQL or relational database skills
• Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP networking
• Proficient with Linux/BSD and 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)

• Experience with Market Data
• Knowledge of microservice architectures
• Knowledge of clean code principles
• DevOps mindset is an asset
• Cloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)
• Experience in building low-latency applications
• 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

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