Staff Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Alpaca; Canada; Remote; CAD 182,000 - 239,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services technology company is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Risk and Margin Team. In this role, you will design and optimize trading infrastructure components, lead initiatives for low-latency performance, and mentor fellow engineers. Candidates should have 10+ years in software engineering, strong expertise in languages such as Go, C++, or Java, and a passion for trading systems.

Benefits

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

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

Monthly Stipend: USD $150

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience in trading or fintech.
• Deep expertise in building low-latency, high-throughput systems.
• Experience in architecture & design for trading systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and design of the risk and margin platform.
• Lead low-latency optimizations and establish best practices.
• Mentor engineers and perform design reviews.

Skills

Go

C++

Java

Distributed Systems

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Redis

Postgres

Aerospike

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Who We Are: 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.

Among 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, totaling 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! 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.

Your Role:

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Risk and Margin 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.

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, design, and technical roadmap of the risk and margin platform.
• Lead initiatives on low‑latency optimizations, deterministic performance, and resiliency.
• Guide integration with exchanges and liquidity venues (FIX, OUCH, ITCH, proprietary APIs) at scale.
• Establish best practices for high‑frequency trading system development (testing, monitoring, incident response).
• Partner with risk and compliance teams to embed real‑time pre‑trade risk, credit, and margin controls.
• Act as a multiplier: mentor engineers, perform design reviews, and elevate engineering standards.
• Lead architecture discussions and long‑term system design for scalability and resilience.
• Drive cross‑team projects that impact multiple trading desks (e.g., global order routing, fault‑tolerant market data infra).
• Proactively identify scalability bottlenecks and lead refactoring/redesign initiatives.
• Serve as a technical point of escalation for production trading issues.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in trading, fintech, or distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in Go, C++, or Java, with a track record of building low‑latency, high‑throughput systems.
• Strong foundation in operating systems internals, networking, and concurrency.
• Demonstrated experience with architecture & system design for trading systems.
• Strong knowledge of messaging, storage, and distributed computation frameworks (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres, Aerospike).
• Experience leading large‑scale migrations/refactors in production‑critical environments.
• Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across multiple teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems.
• Knowledge of cloud, containerization, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Contributions to open‑source projects in systems programming or infrastructure.
• Experience scaling engineering orgs and setting technical strategy.

How We Take Care of You

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• 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. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees can thrive. As set forth in Alpaca’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.