Senior Software Engineer - Payments

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, powering over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our team consists of 400+ globally 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, and Y Combinator.

The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Payments team, 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 daily.

The payments team is responsible for building and maintaining a modern global payments and treasury platform using highly scalable, event-driven microservices. Resilient engineering, technical and operational scalability, and system integrity are vital to our success. You will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in shaping those goals.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, architect, and implement resilient microservices handling money movement and treasury operations at scale
• Build scalable, event-driven architectures and client-facing APIs
• Champion code quality, testing best practices, and system integrity across modern cloud environments
• Collaborate with cross-functional engineering and operational teams to advance our global payments rails

Qualifications

Must-Haves:

• At least 3 years of experience working on distributed systems at scale
• Proven experience building and maintaining microservices and client-facing APIs
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven architectures
• Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
• Experience with message queues and brokers
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience with distributed systems design, debugging, and reliability engineering
• Previous experience with or clear understanding of payment rails and the payment lifecycle
• Familiarity with double-entry accounting and financial ledgers
• Strong problem-solving abilities paired with excellent communication and collaboration skills

Nice-to-Haves:

• Previous experience in the financial industry or knowledge of payment initiations
• Experience with financial reconciliation systems
• Experience with or understanding of the ISO 20022 financial messaging standard
• Experience working in a remote-first or globally distributed startup, exchange, brokerage, market maker, or hedge fund
• Strong DevOps mindset and familiarity with modern infrastructure practices

What We Offer

• Competitive salary & stock options
• Comprehensive health benefits
• Home-office setup budget: One-time USD $500
• Monthly stipend: USD $150 per month via Brex