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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 for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading. The company is backed by $400M in funding from top-tier investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, and Y Combinator, with a globally distributed team of 400+ members.
You will lead the team building Alpaca's algorithmic trading platform, responsible for delivering high-quality, high-performance systems that meet user expectations. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will spend meaningful time writing code, making critical technical decisions, and staying close to production systems while also owning team roadmap, delivery, and engineer development.
You will own technical direction and architecture for the team's services, including trade-off decisions and long-term consequences. You will break down ambiguous business goals into scoped, sequenced engineering work and ship it predictably. Day-to-day responsibilities include sprint planning, unblocking engineers, and keeping work visible to stakeholders. You will set code and design quality standards through reviews, design docs, and your own contributions. You own production reliability, latency, and correctness targets, on-call health, and incident follow-through. You will hire, onboard, conduct 1:1s, provide feedback, and drive performance and career growth for a small team of engineers. Cross-team collaboration with product, operations, compliance, clearing, and other engineering teams is essential.
The technical bar is equivalent to Senior/Staff Software Engineer: deep knowledge in frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, broad experience from CPU-level hardware for high throughput to robust concurrency system design, distributed system architecture for high availability, and object-oriented data modeling. You must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading) and prior experience leading engineers.
Required skills include strong coding ability in C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, or Python; low latency and high throughput optimization; experience with messaging queues and brokers; analytical, data-oriented mindset; knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, and concurrency control; system design skills with object-oriented data modeling and service-oriented architectures; and experience with Order Management Systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems.
