Software Engineer - Core Trading

Who We Are

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

Your Role

Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our 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 our small team.

As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our customers. This requires deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability, and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind.

Qualifications

Must-Haves

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience preferred
• Coding skills in both low and high-level languages around Go, C/C++
• 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
• Experience with highly scalable distributed low latency systems
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, and system abstraction

Nice-to-Haves

• Algo trading experience (professional or personal)
• Experience with development and implementation of Order Management Systems (OMS) and Risk Management Systems (RMS)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with trading or exchange systems (EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading)
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking
• Financial market knowledge (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.)
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (primarily GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

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