Product Security Engineer

Alpaca; Toronto; Remote; CAD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial technology company is seeking an experienced Product Security Engineer to safeguard its assets from cyber threats. This role involves collaborating with engineering and product teams to ensure security best practices, performing security assessments, and responding to vulnerabilities. Ideal candidates will have extensive experience in security operations and engineering, particularly in API and cloud security. This position offers remote work flexibility and competitive compensation.

Benefits

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500

Monthly Stipend: USD $150

Qualifications

• 6-8 years of experience in security operations, engineering, or DevSecOps.
• Ability to review and write secure code.
• Experience in securing containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker).

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with teams to embed security practices.
• Perform threat modeling and security reviews.
• Identify and remediate security vulnerabilities.
• Build automation tools for security testing.
• Participate in security incident response efforts.

Skills

Proficiency in programming languages (Go, Python)

API security (OAuth, JWT)

Cloud security (Google Cloud, AWS)

Knowledge of common security vulnerabilities

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

Excellent communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in Information Technology

Tools

Static code analyzers

Vulnerability scanners

Penetration testing frameworks

Job description

Overview

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 recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. 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.

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.

Our Team Members :

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!

Your Role

We are seeking an experienced Product Security Engineer who can help expand our Security efforts and play a critical role in safeguarding Alpaca\'s assets from evolving cyber threats to ensure the security and integrity of our products.

In this role, you will play a key part in ensuring the security of Alpaca\'s products and infrastructure, protecting our APIs, trading platforms, and customer data from threats. You\'ll collaborate closely with our engineering, product, and operations teams to embed security best practices into our development lifecycle, harden our systems, and respond to emerging threats. If you\'re excited about security, cutting edge financial tech, and thrive in a fast-paced environment, we\'d love to hear from you.

The role requires a deep understanding of Cybersecurity principles, application security, DevSecOps, incident response, cloud security, offensive security, and proactive threat detection with a proven track record of managing security risks and cross functional collaboration. The Security Team is 100% distributed and remote. This role will be reporting directly to the CISO.

Things You Get To Do

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and DevOps to embed security into our API and platform development lifecycle, working hand-in-hand with our Engineering and Product teams
• Perform threat modeling and security reviews to spot risks early and keep our products secure
• Identify, triage, and remediate security vulnerabilities in our codebase, infrastructure, and third-party dependencies, and help respond and manage our bug bounty program
• Build and tweak automation tools for security testing and monitoring
• Participate in security incident response efforts, including investigation, containment, and post-mortem analysis, to ensure rapid resolution and continuous improvement
• Harden our cloud systems (Google Cloud, Kubernetes) and products to meet industry standards and protect against evolving threats
• Team up with product and DevOps crews to make security seamless without slowing us down
• Promote a security-first mindset by providing guidance, training, and documentation to team members on secure coding practices and emerging threats
• Assist with compliance audits and assessments as necessary
• Conduct security research and contribute to the development of new security tools and techniques.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Excited about Alpaca\'s mission and what we\'re building
• 6-8 years of mixed experience in a security operations, security engineering, product security, and DevSecOps
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Go, Python etc.) and the ability to review and write secure code
• Experience with API security (e.g., OAuth, JWT, WAF, rate limiting)
• Experience with cloud security (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS) including DevSecOps and embedding security in the CI / CD pipeline
• A strong understanding of how to secure containerized environments (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker)
• Familiarity with security tools such as static code analyzers, vulnerability scanners, and penetration testing frameworks
• Knowledge of common security vulnerabilities (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and mitigation strategies
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication skills and committed to work collaboratively across the Firm
• Comfortable thriving in a distributed, remote-first team with asynchronous collaboration across time zones
• A curious mindset, empathy for our users and teams, and a commitment to accountability—aligned with Alpaca\'s core values of "Stay Curious," "Have Empathy," and "Be Accountable."
• Available for on-call rotations and after hour responses as needed

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Bachelor\'s degree in Information Technology or a related field
• Security related certifications such as CISSP, GIAC, OSCP, CRTO, K8s is a plus
• Experience in securing and monitoring APIs
• Understanding of financial and privacy regulations
• Experience in the financial services industry
• Business acumen to be able to balance tradeoffs between stakeholders and technology feasibility and budget constraints

How We Take Care of You

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup : One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend : USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.