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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 Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, and Y Combinator, Alpaca operates a globally distributed team of 400+ engineers and brokerage professionals.
You will lead the technical direction of the Margin & Risk team within Prime Engine, owning the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk systems across all asset classes—portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes. This is a high-consequence domain where defects can cause financial loss, incorrectly restrict customer trading, or create regulatory exposure. Latency and correctness are both critical.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and building services that translate complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, observable systems
- Leading real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety
- Driving reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation
- Partnering with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams to define behavior and integration boundaries
- Setting standards for correctness in financial systems: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts
- Leading design reviews, mentoring senior and mid-level engineers, and raising the engineering bar as the team scales from six to ten engineers
- Acting as technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues and driving durable prevention after incidents
You will not manage people directly but will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship, remaining a principal contributor on mission-critical systems. You will be the senior technical anchor for the domain, working with the engineering manager and senior engineers to spread deep ownership as the team grows.
Qualifications:
- 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience; evidence of scope and ownership matters more than strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years.
- Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, data-integrity failure, or inappropriate customer restriction.
- Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems.
- Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust with clear willingness to work primarily in Go. Domain knowledge matters more than prior Go experience.
- Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency.
- Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes.
- Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout.
- Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when business rules are complex or still being defined.
- Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams; curious about the core of the domain and effective as a teammate.
Preferred skills:
- Hands-on margin or risk experience in more than one asset class, with derivatives or recently launched markets especially valuable.
- Familiarity with margin methodologies such as Reg T, portfolio margin, options spread margin, or futures margin.
- Background in brokerage, clearing, exchange, ledger, payments, or settlement systems.
- Experience with options, derivatives, or multi-leg strategies and their risk characteristics.
- Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) for long-running processes such as margin-call lifecycles.
- Experience with observability and production performance tuning.
- Experience leading migrations or refactors in production-critical environments.
