Staff Software Engineer - Margin & Risk

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 our institutional-grade APIs, Alpaca powers over 10 million brokerage accounts.

We are a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator.

About the Role

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our Margin & Risk team, part of Prime Engine. The team builds the systems that protect Alpaca, our partners, and their customers from financial exposure across every asset class the platform supports — equities, options, and crypto today, and new asset classes as the platform expands.

These systems calculate margin requirements, enforce real-time risk and exposure limits, manage margin calls through their full lifecycle, and automate operational workflows. This is a high-consequence domain where latency matters, and correctness matters more.

You will not manage people directly. You will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship, and you will remain a principal contributor on mission-critical systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, and margin-call automation.
• System Design: Design and build services that turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems.
• Performance & Reliability: Drive reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation.
• Collaboration: Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries.
• Standards & Mentorship: Set the standard for correctness in a financial system (transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation). Lead design reviews and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
• Incident Management: Act as a technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents.

Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years.
• Domain Expertise: Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction.
• Technical Stack: Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Data & Systems: Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency. Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and Kubernetes.
• Correctness: Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout.
• Communication: Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined.

Preferred Skills

• Hands-on margin or risk experience in more than one asset class, with derivatives or recently launched markets.
• Familiarity with margin methodologies such as Reg T, portfolio margin, options spread margin, or futures margin.
• Background in brokerage, clearing, exchange, ledger, payments, or settlement systems.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) for long-running processes.
• Experience with observability and production performance tuning.

Benefits & Perks

• 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