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Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. The company is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, and Y Combinator, and operates with a globally distributed team of 400+ members.
As a Software Engineer on the Securities Finance (SecFi) team, you will build and run the backend systems powering Alpaca's lending and borrowing products. The SecFi team owns two primary customer-facing products: Fully Paid Securities Lending (FPSL), where customer shares are lent out and revenue is split back with them, and customer short borrowing, where hard-to-borrow locates are sourced. The team also manages critical internal functionality supporting multiple operational processes for the brokerage.
You will own projects end-to-end, from initial problem discussions through production deployment. Responsibilities include building partner-facing APIs, developing batch pipelines with fixed completion deadlines, improving existing systems for better performance and reliability, and integrating with street partners. You'll gain deep knowledge of securities lending, collateral management, settlement processes, and the regulatory rules governing short selling. The role includes on-call responsibilities, with a focus on fixing root causes rather than managing symptoms.
The team values clear thinking, getting decisions right, and taking ownership. You'll work with people who prioritize substance over tenure or title, and you'll be expected to scope work independently, make reversibility-aware decisions, and push back constructively when you disagree.
REQUIREMENTS (Must-Haves):
- 3+ years building distributed systems that run in production
- Solid fundamentals in computers, networks, databases, and distributed systems, including failure modes
- Productive in Go, PostgreSQL, and Kubernetes
- Ability to design good RESTful APIs and evaluate API design
- Genuine curiosity about how markets work under the hood
- Ownership mindset: scope, build, ship, and support projects independently
- Strong attention to detail and ability to troubleshoot independently when systems break
- Ability to distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions
- Willingness to learn unfamiliar domains and push back constructively on decisions
NICE-TO-HAVES:
- Experience in securities clearing, settlement, or securities finance
- Familiarity with gRPC, Protobuf, Kafka/Redpanda, Grafana, Helm, or Docker
- Experience with Temporal workflow orchestration
- Comfort with daily batch jobs, file-based integrations, and reconciliation work
- Knowledge of broker-dealer operations, Reg SHO, or short-sale rules
