Staff Fullstack Engineer - Alpaca

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.

Our team is a dynamic, globally distributed group of 400+ members working from around the world across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to lead the technical direction of the team that builds Alpaca's Trading API product. Trading API serves developers, traders, and institutions who trade directly with Alpaca. The team owns that customer experience end to end: how customers access the platform, how their accounts are structured and secured, and the applications they use to trade.

The work spans the stack: customer-facing trading applications, identity, account, and permission systems, and integrations for partner apps and AI agents. You will serve as the senior technical anchor—leading through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship as a principal contributor.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for how customers access and use the Trading API: identity and authentication, authorization and permissions, account and sub-account models, partner OAuth, and customer-facing trading and account-management applications.
• Design access models for complex account structures (multi-user accounts, sub-accounts, entity and advisor accounts, delegated API/agent access) ensuring permissions are explicit, auditable, and enforced on the server.
• Lead technical delivery of next-generation Trading API customer applications, including real-time market data, order entry, and positions/order views.
• Drive the transition from legacy monolith endpoints to a dedicated application backend with clear API contracts across platform services.
• Set the security bar for customer-facing systems: session and credential handling, MFA and passkeys, OAuth flows, rate limiting, and input validation.
• Set standards for safe delivery, including feature flags, staged rollouts, preview environments, testing strategies, and production observability.
• Partner with Product, Design, Compliance, Security, Brokerage Operations, and adjacent engineering teams to define behavior and integration boundaries.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, and act as a technical escalation point for production incidents.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with extensive experience in backend services and customer-facing applications.
• Proven ownership of production systems where defects could expose customer data, grant incorrect access, or cause financial loss.
• Deep experience with authentication and authorization: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, session/token management, MFA, and RBAC/ABAC models.
• Strong backend expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, Kotlin, C#, or Rust with a clear willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Strong frontend experience with TypeScript and React, especially in complex, state-heavy applications. Experience with real-time data over WebSockets is strongly preferred.
• Solid knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), API design (REST and gRPC), and service-oriented systems running on Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated rigor regarding correctness and security: threat modeling, testing strategy, edge-case analysis, and safe production rollout.
• Track record of technical leadership and cross-functional collaboration.

Preferred Skills

• Experience building trading, brokerage, or financial applications (order entry, positions/P&L, charting, real-time market data).
• Experience with identity platforms (Amazon Cognito, Keycloak, Auth0), passkeys/WebAuthn, or third-party delegated access.
• Experience with API platforms, developer tools, rate limits, SDKs, or developer dashboards.
• Experience with agentic AI integrations (e.g., MCP servers or tooling enabling AI agents to act on behalf of users).
• Familiarity with FIX or institutional trading workflows.
• Experience leading migrations away from legacy monoliths in production-critical environments.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via Brex Card