Senior Software Engineer (Market Data)

Alpaca; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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

Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month

Stock Options

Medical, Dental, Vision care from day 1

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and scale foundational systems and services, empowering millions of users trading assets. The role involves designing systems and overseeing API architecture while maintaining high software quality.

Candidates should have at least 4 years of experience, proficiency in languages like Go, and a passion for financial markets. Benefits include a home-office setup allowance, monthly stipends, stock options, and comprehensive health plans.

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.
• Experience with CI/CD processes.

Responsibilities

• Help build and scale the systems and services at Alpaca.
• Oversee public API structure and documentation.
• Design highly scalable and mission-critical systems.

Skills

Linux/BSD expertise

Cloud Networking experience

Kubernetes experience

Proficient in Go

SQL or relational database skills

DevOps mindset

Experience with distributed key-value stores

Knowledge of microservice architectures

Job description

• 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
• 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
• This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX-like operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices
• 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

Benefits

• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
• Work with awesome people, clients and partners from around the world
• Stock Options
• Medical, Dental, Vision
• Supplemental health care
• Health benefits from day 1 (internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs)

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

• Proficient with Linux/BSD, and shell scripting
• At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
• Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in Go
• Familiarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networking
• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
• SQL or relational database skills
• A passion for financial markets
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
• Knowledge of microservice architectures
• DevOps mindset is an asset
• Knowledge of clean code principles
• Experience in building low-latency applications
• Cloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)
• Experience with CI/CDA
• Passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
• Experience with distributed key-value stores
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
• Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking