Staff Software Engineer, New Markets Middle East - 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 our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of 400+ experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

Your Role

As a Staff Software Engineer at Alpaca Middle East, you will be a strategic technical leader responsible for architecting, designing, and establishing the foundational software systems that power Alpaca's financial infrastructure in the region. Your primary responsibility will be setting the technical direction for software engineering practices, establishing architectural standards and patterns, and ensuring systems meet regulatory compliance requirements while maintaining reliability, scalability, and performance.

You will independently lead complex, multi-team software initiatives, resolve systemic issues, and shape software strategy across the engineering organization. In addition, you will establish strategic approaches for infrastructure coordination with regional deployments and cloud or data center operations for UAE and Saudi markets. Occasional on-site or regional travel may be required for strategic technical reviews.

Responsibilities

Software Architecture and Strategic Development

• Architect and establish foundational software systems using Go or similar languages, setting technical direction for organizational software development
• Design and establish event-driven architectures, message queues, and asynchronous processing patterns that serve as organizational standards
• Build and maintain APIs, services, and integrations powering Alpaca's financial infrastructure
• Optimize system performance at scale, identifying bottlenecks and implementing efficient solutions
• Ensure systems meet reliability, scalability, and regulatory compliance requirements
• Establish coding standards and best practices, authoring clean, maintainable, and well-tested code
• Design and implement scalable, maintainable, and performant systems that meet business requirements

Technical Leadership and Strategic Expertise

• Serve as the technical authority across system design, architecture, and performance optimization
• Lead complex, multi-team software initiatives from conception to delivery
• Resolve systemic issues impacting the entire organization with innovative problem-solving approaches
• Establish and maintain high standards for quality across the organization, including testing and code review
• Evaluate and recommend strategic technical solutions balancing performance, maintainability, cost, and long-term business goals

Infrastructure Coordination and Strategic Management

• Establish infrastructure coordination frameworks and strategies with DevOps and vendors for regional deployments
• Define organizational approaches ensuring infrastructure meets software requirements, operational standards, and local data residency/regulatory requirements
• Establish vendor management strategies for infrastructure services, ensuring SLAs are met
• Coordinate with cloud providers, data center vendors, and managed service providers
• Travel occasionally within the region to conduct strategic technical reviews and coordinate with vendors on-site as required

Mentoring and Knowledge Sharing

• Actively mentor engineers across all levels (junior, intermediate, and senior)
• Provide strategic technical guidance and architectural review feedback
• Share knowledge through comprehensive documentation, technical talks, and design reviews
• Create organizational learning opportunities through pair programming and mentorship initiatives

Organizational Influence and Strategic Collaboration

• Influence software practices, project direction, and cross-team collaborations across engineering
• Play a leading role in setting organizational processes, standards, and technical vision
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams including product, design, business stakeholders, and executive leadership
• Translate business requirements into technical solutions and roadmaps

Problem Solving and Quality

• Exhibit exceptional problem-solving abilities and consistently drive quality improvements
• Debug complex issues across distributed systems and establish preventive measures
• Advocate for testing, monitoring, and observability best practices across the organization

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience architecting and building complex production systems at scale
• Expert-level mastery of Go or similar backend languages, with advanced system design and architecture skills
• Proven track record of building scalable, high-availability applications handling high transaction volumes
• Deep understanding of software engineering fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, system design principles)
• Extensive experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, pub/sub systems, and asynchronous processing patterns
• Proven ability to independently lead complex, multi-team software initiatives and resolve systemic architectural issues
• Extensive experience with testing methodologies (unit, integration, and end-to-end tests)
• Deep expertise with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), with understanding of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures