Senior Software Engineer - Trading

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 our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals working to open financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our 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.

About the Role

Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. This opportunity is similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days—designing and architecting our platform by wearing many different hats in a small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write code and make critical decisions to deliver the best experience to our customers.

This role requires deep knowledge in frontend and backend development, databases, distributed systems, and broad experience from CPU-level hardware for high throughput to robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability, and object-oriented data modeling.

Prerequisites:

• Must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading).

Who You Are

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience preferred
• Coding skills in low and high-level languages (C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python)
• Low latency and high throughput optimization
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
• Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems, and concurrency control
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, and system abstraction
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management Systems (OMS) and Risk Management Systems (RMS)

Nice-to-Haves

• Algo trading experience (professional or personal)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking
• Financial market knowledge (exchanges, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.)
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (GCP preferred)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

Benefits & Perks

• 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