Senior Software Engineer - Market Data

Social Leverage LLC

Northern (KY)

Hybrid

USD 140,000 - 180,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Home-office setup

Brex card stipend

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build and scale data-driven services powering billions in trades. You will influence system architecture, design high‑performance backend services, and drive latency optimization across distributed components.

The role requires 4+ years of experience with Go or C-family languages, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms. On-site work and competitive compensation are offered, with stock options and stipends.

Qualifications

4+ years of experience building systems at scale.
Proficiency in Go, C, C++, or Rust.
Strong SQL and relational database skills.
Experience with Linux/BSD, shell scripting.
Familiarity with Kubernetes (GKE) and GCP.
Interest in financial markets and high-performance systems.

Responsibilities

Influence architecture of market data systems.
Design scalable, mission-critical backend services.
Focus on low latency and reliability.
Lead cross-team architecture decisions and reviews.
Troubleshoot incidents and participate in on-call as needed.

Skills

C++

Rust

SQL

Linux

Kubernetes

GKE

GCP

Shell scripting

Networking TCP/IP UDP

Tools

Go tooling & libraries

POSIX OS

CI/CD

Job description

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.
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.

As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale 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 market data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture of Alpaca connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. Oversee their public API structure and documentation on both streaming and historical endpoints. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer-first API and is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production the new services, and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly.

We are looking for senior or staff engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions. This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX-like operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.

Things You Get To Do:

Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s market data systems
Design highly scalable, mission-critical systems
Obsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)
Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matters
Maintain good software quality and test coverage
Participate in code reviews
Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in Go
SQL or relational database skills
Familiarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networking
Proficient with Linux/BSD, and shell scripting
Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
A passion for financial markets

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