Senior Software Engineer – Agent Experiences

Alpaca; New York (NY); Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Stock options

New hire home-office setup: USD 500

Monthly stipend: USD 150 via Brex Card

Job summary

Alpaca is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to design and ship autonomous agent execution for Alpaca accounts. You will craft account-level policies, guardrails, and the rule evaluation services that feed into our trading and risk systems, working with MCP servers, identity, and authentication teams.

You will mentor engineers, influence product and risk partners, and drive the implementation end-to-end while shipping in production.

Qualifications

• Production backend experience with ownership and scope.
• Shipped autonomous execution systems.
• Implemented account-level policies with auditing.
• Familiarity with MCP architecture and related standards.

Responsibilities

• Lead application architecture for safe agent execution from tool call to trading systems.
• Design and build account-level policy and guardrails for external agent actions.
• Own services that evaluate rules on the path into trading systems.
• Define agent-initiated trading behavior with tool owners.
• Keep execution model current with MCP protocol and connectors.
• Partner with Product/Compliance/Risk to define and ship the control model.
• Own production reliability for policy/guardrail services.
• Review designs and mentor engineers to raise quality.

Skills

Software engineering

Autonomous execution

Account policy

MCP architecture

Account rules definition

Python/TypeScript

Go

Architectural judgment

Communication

Tools

MCP servers

OAuth/Identity platform

APIs

Job description

Senior Software Engineer - Agent Experiences

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.

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.

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:

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to design and ship autonomous execution for agents acting on Alpaca accounts. The same platform has to serve external algorithmic traders, partners building products on Alpaca, operators, and partners who embed Alpaca so their end users’ agents can act.

You will design and ship account-level policy and the checks on the path in front of our trading and risk systems. You will work with the engineers who own our MCP servers, tools, and skills, and with the team that owns authentication and authorization. You will help Product, Compliance, and Risk shape the control model, and you will ship the implementation.

This is a hands-on role. You will not manage people directly. You will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship, and you will ship the first version yourself. You will partner with Product, Compliance, Risk, and the team that owns identity and authorization to define the control model. Broker risk controls stay with the teams that own them.

Things You Get To Do:

• Lead the application architecture for safe agent execution, from the tool call through to our trading systems.
• Design and build the account-level policy and guardrails for external agent actions.
• Own the services that evaluate those rules on the path into our trading systems.
• Define how agent-initiated trading actions behave, with the engineers who own our tools and skills.
• Keep Alpaca’s execution model current with the MCP protocol and with connector, plugin, and skill standards, and translate what changes into account policy, guardrails, and trading actions.
• Partner with Product, Compliance, Risk, and the identity platform to define the control model and ship it.
• Own production reliability for the policy and guardrail services.
• Review designs across teams and guide the technical decisions where agent actions meet brokerage systems.
• Mentor engineers and raise the quality of design and implementation in this area.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, building and operating production backend systems. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count.
• Shipped autonomous execution: software that took actions under an explicit policy without a person approving each action, and that rejected or stopped actions outside that policy.
• Designed and implemented account-level policy in an application: durable rules for what a caller may do, enforced on the action path, with an audit of the decision.
• Enough MCP architecture to work with stateless and stateful behavior, and experience building to MCP, or to connector, plugin, or skill standards, as they have changed in production.
• Able to define, with Product, Compliance, and Risk, which account rules allow an unattended action.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript, and a willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Strong architectural judgment, with a record of shipping while requirements are still being defined.
• Clear communication with engineers, product, compliance, and risk partners.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

• Experience with agent identity and authorization, such as OAuth, tokens, scopes, and delegated access, and comfort partnering with the team that owns that platform.
• Experience shipping developer-facing tools, SDKs, or MCP servers.
• Experience building agents with a framework such as LangChain.
• Experience or understanding of financial markets.
• Experience working at a startup.
• Experience working remotely.

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 hiring process 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.

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