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Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and fixed income. The company serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts. Alpaca is backed by $400M in funding from top-tier investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Clearing team, you will work on post-trade infrastructure—the systems that power broker-dealer operations after trades are executed. Most work is backend and not user-facing, but is essential to daily operations. The team has recently achieved self-clearing status in US equities and options at the DTCC, and continues to build new integrations and product offerings. You will also contribute to securities finance functions and infrastructure that enables new products like Fully Paid Securities Lending.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own projects end-to-end, from ideation through deployment, cutting through ambiguity to build what's necessary
- Design and build new systems that enable new products or unlock revenue
- Refine existing systems with meaningful, tangible improvements
- Learn about financial market infrastructure and how it keeps markets functioning
- Participate in on-call rotation to maintain system reliability
- Collaborate across teams and influence company direction
The role values quality thinking, execution excellence, practical solutions, and personal accountability over tenure or hierarchy. You will work in a globally distributed team of 400+ members across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-haves:
- Deep interest in how traditional financial markets work
- Ability to lead projects independently with minimal direction
- Strong sense of personal and collective responsibility; willingness to roll up sleeves when issues arise
- Understanding of which design choices matter vs. which can be adjusted
- Intellectual honesty: know what you don't know and seek information rather than guess
- Flexibility to let go of ideas when new information surfaces
- Startup experience; comfort with imperfection and shifting priorities
- Ability to push back constructively and accept decisions that differ from your view
- Attention to detail
- Strong foundational knowledge of computer architecture, networking, databases, and distributed systems
- Productive with Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes
- 5+ years of hands-on experience building reliable and distributed systems
- Ability to design good RESTful APIs and spot poor ones
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience in securities clearing & settlement or securities finance
- Experience with gRPC, Protobuf, Temporal, Grafana, Kafka/Redpanda, Helm, or Docker
