Senior Software Engineer - Identity

Alpaca; Waterloo; Remote; CAD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial technology firm in Canada is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and scale systems for identity verification. The role requires strong problem-solving skills, at least 3 years of experience with systems at scale, and proficiency in Go. The company offers competitive salary, health benefits, and a supportive remote work environment.

Benefits

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500

Monthly Stipend: USD $150

Qualifications

• At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale.
• Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices.
• Ability to debug issues or foresee problems.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely on.
• Help create a financial identity verification and risk management service.
• Implement backend services and design reliable architecture.

Skills

Problem-solving skills

Excellent communication

Collaboration skills

Proactive mindset

Strong coding skills (Go)

Tools

Kubernetes

Google Cloud Platform

PostgreSQL

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 working to open financial services to everyone on the planet. We are committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our API and robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is backed by 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 are a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond, who thrive working from our favorite places around the world.

We are seeking passionate individuals who align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact.

Your Role

As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.

The identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying their identity, evaluating risk, and managing their trading accounts. These people, businesses, and accounts are foundational components of the Alpaca system, and we need to build new capabilities while achieving very high automation rates. We are expanding the platform to handle identity verification on a global basis and to support our growing set of account types.

We are looking for senior engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices is also a great asset we are actively looking for.

Things You Get To Do

• Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely on
• Help us create a global financial identity verification and risk management service
• Implement backend services and work on designing an architecture where reliability matters
• Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions
• Contribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems
• Work with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in general
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset
• Ability to turn business requirements into a flexible implementation model
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team
• A preference for simple and elegant solutions
• At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Ability to write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code
• Experience with domain-driven design and event-driven design
• Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience in the finance industry
• Experience with financial identity management, e.g. KYC
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Experience integrating with external services
• Experience working remotely
• Experience working at a startup
• DevOps mindset is an asset

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.

Recruitment Privacy Policy