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, totalling 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.

Your 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 worth of assets.

The Market Data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. You will oversee public API structures and documentation across streaming and historical endpoints, while architecting, ideating, and deploying high-performance services and libraries. We are seeking engineers with strong fundamentals, proven experience building at scale, and a deep understanding of POSIX-like operating systems and modern orchestration practices.

Things You Get To Do

• Design highly scalable, mission-critical market data provider services
• Maintain high software quality and comprehensive test coverage
• Participate in design discussions and code reviews
• Troubleshoot incidents and resolve reported bugs

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• BSc/MSc or equivalent practical experience in Computer Science or a related field
• Minimum 3 years of backend software development experience
• Hands-on experience with Docker or Kubernetes
• Strong DevOps mindset
• Working knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with large datasets
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience (CKA or CKAD certification is a plus)
• Experience with SQL
• Familiarity with IP networking and protocols
• Solid understanding of financial markets
• Experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Hands-on knowledge of shell scripting and Linux
• Familiarity with microservice architectures and clean code principles

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Go (primary), Python
• Protocols: REST, gRPC, WebSockets, SSE
• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Services (GKE, BigTable)
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Health benefits
• New hire home-office setup: USD $500 one-time stipend
• Monthly stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card