Staff Software Engineer - Margin & Risk, Stock Options

Alpaca; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD 500

Monthly Stipend: USD 150 per month

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Margin & Risk engineering efforts within Prime Engine. You’ll own the architecture across asset classes, including portfolio and intraday margin, and guide real-time risk controls for equities, options, and crypto.

You will mentor a team of engineers, conduct design reviews, and partner with Product, Compliance, and Operations to define safe, scalable systems. Latency and correctness are critical in this high-stakes domain.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend or distributed systems with ownership.
• Experience owning high-volume systems with financial impact.
• Proven ability to design low-latency, high-throughput services.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes.
• Design services translating margin rules into correct, testable systems.
• Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path.
• Improve reliability and performance of services.
• Collaborate with Product, Operations, Compliance and other teams.
• Maintain correctness: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers.
• Act as escalation point for production margin and risk issues.

Skills

Backend systems

Go/Java/C++/Rust

Relational databases

Kubernetes

Event-driven architecture

Technical leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Kafka

gRPC

PostgreSQL

Redis

Temporal

Job description

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Margin & Risk engineering efforts within Prime Engine. You’ll own the architecture across asset classes, including portfolio and intraday margin, and guide real-time risk controls for equities, options, and crypto.

You will mentor a team of engineers, conduct design reviews, and partner with Product, Compliance, and Operations to define safe, scalable systems. Latency and correctness are critical in this high-stakes domain.