Director of Engineering, Trading

Alpaca; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

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

Monthly Stipend: USD $150

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Director-level engineering leader to oversee its institutional trading platform, enhancing its multi-asset capabilities. The role requires proven experience in complex, market-facing systems and team leadership.

This position demands strong architectural judgment and a deep understanding of institutional trading technology. An exciting opportunity to make a significant impact with a rapidly growing company.

Qualifications

• Director-level experience with critical market-facing platforms.
• Ability to build and scale engineering teams focused on complex systems.
• Deep knowledge of institutional trading and brokerage technology.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the engineering roadmap for the institutional trading platform.
• Build, lead, and scale a team of engineers focused on execution.
• Coordinate initiatives across trading, risk, and customer tools.

Skills

Leadership

Architectural judgment

Institutional trading knowledge

Distributed systems understanding

Job description

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 D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 9 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 380+ 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 building the next‑generation market infrastructure that powers the most sophisticated institutional use cases and expands its API‑driven platform to support complex, high‑performance “agentic” trading strategies. This strategic expansion ensures a robust and reliable foundation for all active traders, while tailoring our industry‑leading brokerage platform to meet the demanding needs of institutional investors.

Reporting to the CPO/CTO/OCTO [TBD], you will build and scale a focused engineering organization responsible for institutional trading capabilities across multiple asset classes. You will work closely with the Global Head of Brokerage and other senior leaders to evolve Alpaca’s platform toward a multi‑asset, cross‑margining offering spanning FX, futures, and other derivatives alongside existing equities and options.

This role is designed for a Director‑level engineering leader who can extend a proven brokerage platform into a new institutional tier through strong architectural judgment, execution discipline, and team leadership.

Things You Get To Do

• Define and own and execute the engineering roadmap for Alpaca’s institutional trading platform
• Build, lead, and scale a high‑performing team of engineers with a strong culture of ownership and execution
• Partner with the Office of the CTO and Global Head of Brokerage to align engineering priorities with institutional and prime brokerage strategy
• Lead the evolution toward a multi‑asset trading architecture supporting cross‑margining across equities, options, FX, futures, and other derivatives
• Design and deliver institutional trading capabilities, including architectural decisions across trading APIs, our proprietary order management system, real‑time risk, and margin engines
• Set and enforce technical standards for performance, availability, scalability, and operational resilience in latency‑sensitive systems
• Coordinate multiple concurrent initiatives across trading, risk, margin, asset classes, and customer‑facing tooling
• Work cross‑functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, Operations, and Finance to deliver production‑ready systems
• Represent institutional trading engineering in executive‑level planning and decision‑making
• Provide technical and architectural thought leadership in trading and brokerage technology, influencing direction internally and through industry engagement
• Hands‑on engineering, such as writing PoC code, conducting code reviews, deploying to production, and providing an L3 escalation contact point

Who You Are (Must‑Haves)

• A Director‑level (or above) engineering leader with experience owning critical, market‑facing platforms
• Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams focused on complex, high‑impact systems
• Deep understanding of institutional trading and brokerage technology, including execution systems, risk and margin platforms, and trading analytics
• Experience designing or operating systems that support cross‑asset risk and margining across multiple asset classes
• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance speed, reliability, and control in regulated environments
• Deep knowledge of OS fundamentals and distributed systems, sufficient to set architectural direction and evaluate designs for performance‑critical trading systems
• Effective partner to senior business, brokerage, and product leaders
• Clear communicator with technical and non‑technical stakeholders

Who You Might Be (Nice‑to‑Haves)

• Experience with algorithmic trading systems across multiple asset classes
• Exposure to portfolio margin or cross‑margining methodologies
• Background supporting hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, or other institutional clients
• Experience contributing to architecture standards or externally visible technical initiatives
• Prior experience scaling trading platforms during periods of rapid growth

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.