Senior Software Engineer - Ledger

Drive Capital

San Mateo (CA)

On-site

USD 170,000 - 250,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Health Benefits

New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time $

Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month

Job summary

Alpaca is a US-headquartered fintech provider of brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and more. As a Senior Engineer on the Ledger Team, you will design, implement, and maintain the ledger system that serves as the source of truth for account transactions and reporting.

You will work with cross-functional partners to deliver scalable, defect-free solutions, shaping the roadmap and driving architectural decisions at scale.

Qualifications

5+ years of experience building systems at scale.
Strong Go coding skills with a focus on maintainability.
Experience with IDLs (protobuf) and RPC frameworks (gRPC).
Comfortable collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Ability to design scalable, reliable backend services.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with finance, operations and product teams to deliver high-impact features.
Build backend systems with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability.
Own delivery of high-visibility features from design to deployment.
Collaborate with engineering teams to improve Alpaca’s system health.

Skills

Go programming

System design

Debugging

Team collaboration

Proactive problem solver

Tools

protobuf

gRPC

GCP

PostgreSQL

Job description

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructurefor 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 favourite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact.

Your Role:

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Ledger Team is responsible for building a modern ledger system, whose purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account. From a business perspective, the ledger provides a structured and organized system for recording and aggregating transactional data. It plays a crucial role in supporting financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance. From an engineering perspective, the ledger serves as the source of truth for many services in the Alpaca ecosystem.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineer who is obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and who is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team.

Things You Get To Do:

Collaborate with internal stakeholders–including finance, operations, and product teams–to deliver high-impact features/projects
Build backend systems/components with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability in mind
Own the delivery of high-visibility features/projects, from design to deployment
Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the health of Alpaca’s systems

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

A seasoned engineer with 5+ years of experience working on systems at scale
Obsessed with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset
A collaborator who is capable of creating alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems
Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
Experience with IDLs (e.g., protobuf), RPC frameworks (e.g., gRPC), cloud platforms (e.g., GCP), and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)

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