Senior Software Engineer - Market Data

Alpaca

Toronto

Hybrid

CAD 100,000 - 140,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

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

Monthly Stipend: USD $150

Job summary

Alpaca in Toronto is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to influence the architecture of market data systems and implement scalable backend services. Candidates should have at least 4 years of experience in systems at scale, proficiency in compiled imperative languages like Go, and SQL skills. Benefits include a competitive salary, stock options, health benefits, and an office setup stipend. Join a diverse team innovating in financial services.

Qualifications

At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale.
Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams.
Excited about what we are building at Alpaca.

Responsibilities

Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s market data systems.
Design highly scalable, mission-critical systems.
Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matters.

Skills

Experience with compiled imperative languages (Go, C, C++, Rust)

SQL or relational database skills

Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP networking

Proficient with Linux/BSD and shell scripting

Experience with Kubernetes

Experience with major cloud platforms (GCP)

Architecting and leading medium-scale projects

Job description

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 D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 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 9 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. 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!

Current Opportunity

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

Market Data Team

The market data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture of Alpaca connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. Oversee their public API structure and documentation on both streaming and historical endpoints. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer‑first API and is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production the new services, and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for senior or staff 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. This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX‑like operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.

What You Get To Do

Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s market data systems
Design highly scalable, mission‑critical systems
Obsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)
Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matters
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

Must‑Haves

At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in Go
SQL or relational database skills
Familiarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networking
Proficient with Linux/BSD, and shell scripting
Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
Proven track record of architecting and leading medium‑scale projects involving multiple teams
Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
A passion for financial markets

Nice‑to‑Haves