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.

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.

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. We are a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members working across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

The Role

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 trading billions of dollars in assets.

The Market Data team is responsible for improving Alpaca's architecture connected to data products like stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets, overseeing public API structures and documentation for both streaming and historical endpoints. The team builds a developer-first API, planning, experimenting, and deploying new services and libraries to solve high-scale technical challenges.

Responsibilities

• Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s market data systems
• Design highly scalable, mission-critical systems
• Obsess over latency and performance optimizations
• Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matter
• Maintain robust software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews and engineering discussions
• Troubleshoot incidents and reported bugs
• Participate in on-call rotations for critical engineering operations

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience working on distributed systems at scale
• Experience with compiled imperative languages (e.g., Go, C, C++, Rust); most critical services are written in Go
• Strong SQL and relational database skills
• Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP networking
• Proficiency with Linux/BSD and shell scripting
• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects across multiple teams
• Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration systems (Alpaca primarily uses GKE)
• Experience with major cloud platforms (primarily GCP)
• Passion for financial markets

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with financial market data feeds
• Knowledge of microservice architectures and clean code principles
• DevOps mindset and cloud networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)
• Experience building low-latency applications and working with distributed key-value stores
• Familiarity with CI/CD, observability, tracing, and continuous profiling
• Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies

Compensation & Benefits

• 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