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Staff Software Engineer, Core Trading
<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>Who We Are:</strong></p>
<p>Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our <a href="https://alpaca.markets/blog/alpaca-raises-150-million-at-a-1-15b-valuation-to-build-the-global-standard-for-brokerage-infrastructure/">recent Series D funding round</a> brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision.</p>
<p>Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 9 million brokerage accounts.</p>
<p>Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of <strong>opening financial services to everyone on the planet</strong>. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it.</p>
<p>Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Our Team Members:</strong></p>
<p>We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!<br><br>We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.</p></div><h3><strong>Your Role:</strong></h3>
<p>We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Core Trading Team. This is a high-impact technical role for someone who wants to remain deeply hands-on while shaping the architecture of our trading infrastructure. You will be the technical authority on low-latency systems, responsible for pushing the boundaries of performance, determinism, and scale across order routing, execution, and market connectivity.</p>
<p>You will not manage people directly — instead, you will lead through technical expertise, code quality, and design influence, mentoring others while continuing to be a principal contributor to mission-critical systems.</p>
<h3><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Own the architecture, design, and technical roadmap of the core trading platform.</li>
<li>Lead initiatives on low-latency optimizations, deterministic performance, and resiliency.</li>
<li>Guide integration with exchanges and liquidity venues (FIX, OUCH, ITCH, proprietary APIs) at scale.</li>
<li>Establish best practices for high-frequency trading system development (testing, monitoring, incident response).</li>
<li>Partner with risk and compliance teams to embed real-time pre-trade risk, credit, and margin controls.</li>
<li>Act as a multiplier: mentor engineers, perform design reviews, and elevate engineering standards.</li>
<li>Lead architecture discussions and long-term system design for scalability and resilience.</li>
<li>Drive cross-team projects that impact multiple trading desks (e.g., global order routing, fault-tolerant market data infra).</li>
<li>Proactively identify scalability bottlenecks and lead refactoring/redesign initiatives.</li>
<li>Serve as a technical point of escalation for production trading issues.</li>
</ul>
<h3><strong>Qualifications</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.</li>
<li>10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in trading, fintech, or distributed systems.</li>
<li>Deep expertise in Go, C++, or Java, with a track record of building low-latency, high-throughput systems.</li>
<li>Strong foundation in operating systems internals, networking, and concurrency.</li>
<li>Demonstrated experience with architecture & system design for trading systems.</li>
<li>Strong knowledge of messaging, storage, and distributed computation frameworks (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres, Aerospike).</li>
<li>Experience leading large-scale migrations/refactors in production-critical environments.</li>
<li>Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across multiple teams.</li>
</ul>
<h3><strong>Preferred Skills</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems.</li>
<li>Knowledge of cloud, containerization, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker).</li>
<li>Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).</li>
<li>Contributions to open-source projects in systems programming or infrastructure.</li>
<li>Experience scaling engineering orgs and setting technical strategy</li>
</ul><div class="content-conclusion"><h3><strong>How We Take Care of You:</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Competitive Salary & Stock Options</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Health Benefits</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card</span></li>
</ul>
<p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.<br></span></em></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 8pt;"><a href="https://files.alpaca.markets/disclosures/AlpacaRecruitmentPrivacyPolicy.pdf"><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recruitment Privacy Policy</span></em></a></span></p></div>