Senior Software Engineer - Trading

Alpaca; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

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 seeking a seasoned software engineer to build and scale its algo trading platform. You will design and implement cross‑cutting components, writing substantial code across systems, databases, and services to deliver a robust trading experience.

The role requires deep expertise in low and high level languages, distributed systems, and high-throughput architectures, with a startup mindset and willingness to wear many hats in a small team.

Qualifications

• Must have software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS/RMS/algorithimic trading).
• Strong backend and frontend capabilities with deep understanding of distributed architectures.
• Experience leading projects or teams in high-performance environments.

Responsibilities

• Build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy users with high quality and performance.
• Design and architect the platform across frontend, backend, databases, and distributed systems.

Skills

C/C++

Go

Zig

Rust

Java

Scala

Python

Low latency

Messaging queues

Distributed systems

System design

OMS RMS

Lead experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

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 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
• Health Benefits
• 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.