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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 $400M in funding from top-tier investors including Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator, Alpaca operates a globally distributed team of 400+ engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals.
The Market Data team is responsible for architecting and scaling Alpaca's data systems across stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. This role focuses on improving the overall architecture, public API structure, and documentation for both streaming and historical endpoints. The team builds developer-first APIs while tackling significant technical challenges at scale.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will influence the overall architecture of Alpaca's market data systems, design highly scalable mission-critical systems, and obsess over latency optimization. You'll implement backend services, lead architecture decisions where scalability and resilience matter, maintain high software quality and test coverage, participate in code reviews, troubleshoot incidents, and may be on-call for time-sensitive engineering projects.
Required qualifications include 4+ years of experience building systems at scale, proficiency with compiled imperative languages (Go, C, C++, Rust), SQL/relational database skills, TCP/IP and UDP networking familiarity, Linux/BSD and shell scripting proficiency, Kubernetes or workload orchestration experience (GKE), major cloud platform experience (GCP), and a passion for financial markets. You should have a proven track record architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams.
Nice-to-have skills include market data experience, microservice architecture knowledge, low-latency application development, distributed key-value stores, CI/CD, observability and tracing, capacity planning, and DevOps mindset.
