Staff Software Engineer - Corporate Actions & Security Master

Alpaca; Greater London; Remote; GBP 110,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD $500

Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month

Job summary

Alpaca seeks a hands-on Staff Software Engineer focused on Corporate Actions and the Security Master. You will design and build systems to manage security reference data, validate announcements, calculate entitlements, process cash and position changes, and reconcile outcomes across a global brokerage platform.

You’ll work with Go, distributed, event-driven services, and relational DBs like PostgreSQL, on cloud-native GCP/Kubernetes.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience in production systems.
• Hands-on Corporate Actions, Security Master, or securities-processing in financial data contexts.
• Strong understanding of terms, entitlements, elections, and reconciliation.
• Experience with financial data ingestion, normalization, lineage, and cross-source validation.
• Strong coding and system-design skills, preferably Go, with distributed services experience.
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL) and cloud-native systems (GCP, Kubernetes).

Responsibilities

• Design systems for Corporate Actions, Security Master, and lifecycle processing across markets.
• Ingest, normalize, enhance, and cross-verify security/event data from authoritative sources.
• Build entitlement processing using validated records, elections, currencies, and fractions.
• Support dividends, splits, mergers, tenders, and other corporate actions affecting accounts.
• Manage security setup, symbols, listings, exchanges, currencies, and lifecycle status.
• Create auditable workflows for validation, approvals, processing, corrections, exceptions, and reconciliation.
• Ensure changes propagate across books, records, positions, ledger, trading, tax, and customer systems.
• Write and operate production code in collaboration with Operations, Product, and other teams.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Event-driven

Financial data

Tools

PostgreSQL

GCP

Kubernetes

Job description

Staff Software Engineer - Corporate Actions & Security Master

Remote - North America and Europe

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!
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

Alpaca is looking for a hands-on engineer with deep knowledge of Corporate Actions and Security Master systems.

You understand dividends, reorganizations, splits, mergers, tenders, redemptions, elections, and security lifecycle events. You know that entitlements are determined by validated announcement terms and the applicable stock record—and that vendor data must be enhanced and cross-verified before it can safely affect customer accounts.

You will help build the systems that manage security reference data, validate Corporate Action announcements, calculate entitlements, process resulting cash and position changes, and reconcile outcomes across a global brokerage platform.

Things You Get To Do

• Design systems for Corporate Actions, Security Master, and securities lifecycle processing across U.S. and international markets.
• Ingest, normalize, enhance, and cross-verify security and event data from vendors, depositories, custodians, and other authoritative sources.
• Build entitlement processing using validated announcement records, stock records, elections, withholding, currencies, and fractional-share rules.
• Support dividends, interest, splits, reverse splits, mergers, exchanges, spin-offs, tenders, rights, redemptions, calls, maturities, and elections.
• Manage security setup and changes involving symbols, identifiers, listings, exchanges, currencies, and lifecycle status.
• Build auditable workflows for validation, approvals, processing, corrections, exceptions, and reconciliation.
• Ensure security and event changes propagate accurately across books and records, positions, ledger, trading, margin, tax, and customer-facing systems.
• Write and operate production code while partnering closely with Operations, Product, and other engineering teams.

Who You Are

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex production systems.
• Hands-on Corporate Actions, Security Master, or securities-processing experience within a broker-dealer, clearing firm, custodian, bank, depository, transfer agent, or financial data vendor.
• Strong understanding of announcement terms, record and effective dates, stock-record eligibility, entitlements, elections, fractions, and reconciliation.
• Experience with financial data ingestion, normalization, versioning, lineage, and cross-source validation.
• Strong coding and system-design skills, preferably in Go, with experience building distributed and event-driven services.
• Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL, and cloud-native systems such as GCP and Kubernetes.
• Strong ownership and the ability to translate complex operational and financial-market requirements into reliable, auditable software.

Nice to Have

• Experience with DTCC/DTC Corporate Actions processing or international market infrastructure.
• Familiarity with ISO 15022, ISO 20022, or SWIFT Corporate Actions messages.
• Experience building an entitlement engine, Security Master, symbology platform, stock record, reconciliation system, or brokerage ledger.
• Understanding of how Corporate Actions affect trading, margin, tax, securities lending, fractional shares, and customer statements.

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

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.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A \"disabled veteran\" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A \"recently separated veteran\" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An \"active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran\" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An \"Armed forces service medal veteran\" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.