Software Engineer, Securities Finance - Alpaca

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. As a licensed financial services company, we serve hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team of 400+ members spans the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. We are proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Your Role

As a Software Engineer on the Securities Finance (SecFi) team, you'll build and run the systems behind Alpaca's lending and borrowing products. This is a backend role powering critical brokerage customer experiences.

Our current customer-facing products include Fully Paid Securities Lending (FPSL)—where we lend out customers' fully paid shares and split revenue back with them—and customer short borrowing for hard-to-borrow locates. SecFi owns the revenue line and short-sale infrastructure within our self-clearing stack for US equities and options, alongside internal functionality powering multiple operational brokerage processes.

What You Get To Do

• Work with people who care more about clear thinking and getting it right than about tenure or title.
• Own a project from the first conversation about the problem through to production deployment.
• Build systems that enable new products and revenue, from partner-facing APIs to batch pipelines.
• Refine existing systems to handle increasing scale and volume.
• Master the mechanics of securities lending, collateral, settlement, and short-selling regulations.
• Take your turn on-call, focusing on root-cause fixes for recurring issues.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Take building systems that people trust with their money seriously.
• Genuine curiosity about how markets work under the hood.
• Ability to independently scope, build, ship, and support projects.
• Ownership mentality to fix production issues regardless of who wrote the original code.
• Strong architectural judgment distinguishing easily reversible decisions from high-consequence ones.
• Resourceful problem-solving skills and intellectual honesty.
• Collaborative contributor who pushes back when necessary and aligns once decisions are made.
• Strong fundamentals in computers, networks, databases, and distributed systems.
• 3+ years building production-grade distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes.
• Ability to design and evaluate clean RESTful APIs.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience in securities clearing, settlement, or finance.
• Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, Kafka/Redpanda, Grafana, Helm, Docker, and Temporal.
• Comfort with daily batch jobs, file-based integrations, and reconciliation.
• Familiarity with broker-dealer operations, Reg SHO, or short-sale rules.

Benefits

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