Software Engineer - Advisory Suite

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. Serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, Alpaca supports broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

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, SBI Group, and Y Combinator.

Role Overview

As a Software Engineer on the Advisory Suite team, you will build Alpaca's proprietary set of services to meet high quality and performance demands for advisory products (Block Trading, Portfolio Management, IRA, etc.). This opportunity offers the chance to design and architect core platform infrastructure while wearing many different hats in a small, fast-paced team.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and design scalable, high-availability distributed systems for advisory products.
• Write robust code across both frontend and backend systems, with a strong focus on data modeling and distributed system design.
• Make critical architectural decisions regarding low-latency, high-throughput optimizations and concurrency control.
• Deliver reliable, low-latency financial transaction services to Alpaca's global user base.

Requirements (Must-Haves)

• Previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading).
• Strong system design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, and system abstraction.
• Senior-level software engineering experience in low and high-level languages such as C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, or Python.
• Deep understanding of low-latency and high-throughput performance optimization.
• Hands-on experience with messaging queues and message brokers.
• Solid knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, and concurrency control.
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management Systems (OMS) or heavily loaded financial transactional systems.

Nice-to-Haves

• Knowledge of the FIX protocol.
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Comprehensive Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: $500 USD (one-time)
• Monthly Stipend: $150 USD per month via Brex Card