Team Lead - Trading

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, totaling 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

Your job is to lead the team building Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. You will design and architect our platform by wearing many different hats in a small team. As a Team Lead, you will write code and make critical technical decisions, while also staying accountable for how the team works: what it builds, how it prioritizes, how it grows, and how reliably it ships.

This is a hands-on leadership role. We expect you to stay close to the code and the system, spending a meaningful part of your time in the codebase, in design reviews, and on production issues, alongside owning the team's roadmap and developer growth.

What You Will Own

• Technical Direction & Architecture: Guide architecture for team services, including trade-off decisions and long-term consequences.
• Roadmap & Delivery: Break down ambiguous business goals into scoped, sequenced engineering work and ship predictably.
• Day-to-Day Execution: Manage sprint/cycle planning, unblock engineers, and keep work visible to stakeholders.
• Code & Design Quality: Set standards through code reviews, design docs, and hands-on contributions.
• Production Ownership: Ensure reliability, latency, and correctness targets for trading systems, on-call health, and incident follow-through.
• People & Mentorship: Lead hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, feedback, performance, and career growth for a small engineering team.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Coordinate with product, operations, compliance, clearing, and partner engineering teams.

Requirements

• Strong software engineer at a senior or staff level with prior team leadership or tech lead experience.
• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers through mentoring, feedback, and raising technical standards.
• Track record of delivering complex distributed systems on schedule.
• Strong coding skills in low- and high-level languages (C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python).
• Deep understanding of low latency and high throughput optimization.
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers.
• Analytical, data-oriented mindset and strong system design capabilities (object-oriented data modeling, SOA, system abstraction).
• Deep knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, and concurrency control.
• Direct experience developing and implementing Order Management Systems (OMS) or Risk Management Systems (RMS).
• Clear written and verbal communication skills across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and fast-paced startup environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience hiring and building an engineering team from a small base.
• Experience owning a production trading or brokerage system as the accountable lead.
• Algorithmic trading experience (professional or personal).
• Knowledge of the FIX protocol and financial market infrastructure (exchanges, clearing, broker-dealers, financial ledgers).
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking.
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills.
• Experience with GCP, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience working with distributed, remote-first teams across time zones.

How We Take Care of You

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