Director of Engineering, Trading

Alpaca

United States

Remote

USD 180,000 - 300,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD 500

Monthly Stipend: USD 150 via Brex Card

Job summary

Alpaca is building the next-generation market infrastructure that powers institutional trading across multiple asset classes, while expanding its API-driven platform to support cross-margining and multi-asset capabilities. You will lead a focused engineering organization reporting to senior leaders to scale trading systems.

This role requires strong architectural judgment, execution discipline, and the ability to partner with the CTO and product teams to deliver production-ready,

Qualifications

Directors-level engineering leader with ownership of market-facing platforms.
Proven track record building and scaling engineering teams for high-impact systems.
Deep understanding of institutional trading and brokerage technology, including execution systems, risk and margin platforms.
Experience designing or operating cross-asset risk and margining across multiple asset classes.
Strong architectural judgment balancing speed, reliability, and control in regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Define and own the engineering roadmap for Alpaca’s institutional trading platform.
Lead and scale a high-performing team of engineers with ownership culture.
Partner with CTO Office and Global Head of Brokerage to align priorities with strategy.
Evolve toward multi-asset trading architecture, cross-margining across asset classes.
Drive decisions across trading APIs, order management, real-time risk, and margin engines.
Set technical standards for performance, availability, and resilience in latency-sensitive systems.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Director-level

Institutional trading

Cross-asset architecture

Architectural judgment

Team building

Tools

Trading APIs

OMS

Risk & margin engines

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 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 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 but not limited to:
Drive 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: