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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+ members.
You will build Alpaca's proprietary advisory suite services (Block Trading, Portfolio Management, IRA, etc.) to deliver high-quality, high-performance solutions. This is an early-stage platform-building opportunity similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their formative years. You'll wear multiple hats in a small, high-impact team, making critical architectural decisions and writing substantial code across the full stack.
The role demands deep expertise in both frontend and backend systems, databases, and distributed systems. You'll optimize for high throughput and low latency, design robust concurrent systems, architect distributed systems for high availability, and model complex data structures with long-term scalability in mind. Prior experience with trading or exchange systems is essential—OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, or quant systems.
Must-have qualifications include strong system design skills (object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures), senior-level software engineering experience, proficiency in low and high-level languages (C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python), expertise in low-latency and high-throughput optimization, experience with messaging queues and brokers, analytical data-oriented mindset, and deep knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, and concurrency control. Specific experience developing Order Management Systems (OMS) or high-load financial transactional systems is required.
Nice-to-have skills include FIX protocol knowledge and experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking.
