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Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries. The company provides institutional-grade APIs for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts. Backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier investors including Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator, Alpaca operates a globally distributed team of 400+ members.
The Identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying their identity, evaluating risk, and managing trading accounts. These foundational systems support millions of users trading billions of dollars in assets. The team is expanding the platform to handle identity verification globally and support a growing set of account types.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Identity team, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation. You will have autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals. Key responsibilities include contributing to a core system relied upon by millions of end users, creating a global financial identity verification and risk management service, implementing backend services with a focus on reliability and architecture, taking ownership of tasks and proactively addressing technical challenges, contributing to architectural decisions, working cross-functionally with other teams, maintaining software quality and test coverage, participating in code reviews, troubleshooting incidents and bugs, and potentially being on-call for timely engineering projects.
The role emphasizes quality solutions, strong fundamentals, proven experience building and architecting at scale, and the willingness to challenge conventions. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices is highly valued.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-Haves:
- At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale
- Proven experience building and maintaining microservices
- Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
- Ability to write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code
- Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven design
- Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
- Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
- Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL
- Strong problem-solving skills and proactive mindset
- Ability to turn business requirements into flexible implementation models
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team
- Preference for simple and elegant solutions
- Ability to debug issues or foresee and avoid problems
Nice-to-Haves:
- Experience in the finance industry
- Experience with financial identity management (e.g., KYC)
- Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
- Experience integrating with external services
- Experience working remotely
- Experience working at a startup
- DevOps mindset
