Senior Software Engineer - Trading

Alpaca; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock Options

New Hire Home-Office Setup

Monthly Stipend

Job summary

Alpaca is building the next generation of algo trading infrastructure. We’re seeking a seasoned software engineer to help design and implement a high-performance platform that powers order routing, risk checks, and market data processing.

As a member of a small, world-spanning team, you’ll own critical subsystems, write scalable code in multiple languages, and shape architecture for low latency, high availability, and long-term growth.

Qualifications

• Lead software engineer with experience in fast-paced trading environments.
• Proficient in multiple languages (C/C++, Go, Rust, Java, Python).
• Deep understanding of low latency, high throughput systems.

Responsibilities

• Build Alpaca's algo trading platform to deliver high performance.
• Architect and implement subsystems for order management, risk, and data processing.
• Contribute across frontend and backend with distributed systems focus.

Skills

Lead software engineer

C/C++

Go

Rust

Java

Python

High-frequency trading

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GCP

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.

Your Role:

Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service. This opportunity is similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days, designing and architecting our platform by wearing many different hats in our small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our customers. This certainly requires deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind. Joining an early stage startup, the payoff to this highly demanding environment will be worth the effort.

You must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading).

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred
• Coding skills in both low and high level languages around C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python
• Low latency and high throughput optimization
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
• Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems and concurrency control
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)

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

• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

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.

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.