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Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure serving stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading. The company operates as a licensed financial services provider with institutional-grade APIs serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries, including 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 investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, and Y Combinator.
In this role, you will build Alpaca's algo trading platform to deliver high-quality, high-performance brokerage services. This is a foundational engineering opportunity similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days—you'll design and architect the platform while wearing multiple hats in a small, high-impact team. As an experienced engineer, you will write substantial code and make critical architectural decisions affecting customer experience. The role demands deep expertise across frontend and backend systems, databases, distributed systems, CPU-level hardware optimization for high throughput, robust concurrency design, distributed system architecture for high availability, and object-oriented data modeling with long-term scalability in mind.
The company operates a globally distributed team of 400+ members spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. Core values include Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable.
Benefits include competitive salary and stock options, health benefits, a one-time $500 home-office setup stipend, and a $150 monthly stipend via Brex Card.
**Requirements:**
- Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience preferred
- Coding proficiency in both low-level (C/C++) and high-level languages (Go)
- Expertise in low-latency and high-throughput optimization
- Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
- Analytical, data-oriented mindset and skills
- Deep knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low-latency systems, and concurrency control
- Demonstrated experience building highly scalable distributed low-latency systems
- Strong system design skills including object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, and system abstraction
**Nice-to-Haves:**
- Algo trading experience (professional or personal)
- Order Management Systems (OMS) and Risk Management Systems (RMS) development experience
- FIX protocol knowledge
- Trading or exchange systems experience (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading)
- Observability, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking experience
- Financial market knowledge (exchanges, broker-dealers, clearing)
- Financial ledger experience
- Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
- Major cloud platform experience (GCP preferred)
- Docker and Kubernetes experience
