Software Engineer - Core Trading

Alpaca; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD $500

Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month

Job summary

Alpaca, a global brokerage infrastructure provider, is hiring an experienced engineer to build and scale its algo trading platform. You will design and implement distributed systems, optimize latency, and own critical components across backend and frontend layers.

Join a small, fast-moving team and work on high-throughput systems with modern tooling, including Docker and Kubernetes, to deliver reliable services for thousands of institutions.

Qualifications

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred.
• Proficient in Go and C/C++, with focus on low latency and high throughput.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, databases and concurrency control.
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers.
• Familiarity with service-oriented architectures and OO data modeling.

Responsibilities

• Build Alpaca's algo trading platform to deliver high performance.
• Architect and implement backend and frontend components across services.
• Make decisions to ensure high availability and low latency for users.

Skills

Go

C/C++

Low latency

Distributed systems

Data analytics

Messaging queues

System design

Concurrency control

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Who We Are

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

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 10 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 $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members

We're a dynamic team of 400+ 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

Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. This opportunity is similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days, designing and architecting our platform by wearing many different hats in our small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our customers. This certainly requires deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind. Joining an early stage startup, the payoff to this highly demanding environment will be worth the effort.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred
• Coding skills in both low and high level languages around Go, C/C++
• Low latency and high throughput optimization
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
• Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems and concurrency control
• Experience with highly scalable distributed low latency systems.
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading)
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

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.

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