Software Engineer – Advisory Suite

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

Job summary

Alpaca in the United States is seeking an experienced software engineer to help build our proprietary services for high-performance trading platforms (Block Trading, Portfolio management, IRA, etc.).

You will design and implement scalable backend and frontend components, work across order management and market data interfaces, and optimize for low latency and throughput using C/C++, Go, Rust, Java, Python, and related technologies.

Qualifications

• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction (must have).
• Senior experience preferred with deep backend/frontend knowledge and high throughput focus.
• Proficiency in multiple languages: C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python (must have).
• Experience with low latency optimization and distributed systems design.
• Familiarity with messaging queues/brokers and concurrency control.
• Knowledge of order management systems (OMS/EMS) or high-load financial transactional systems.

Skills

System design

Senior engineer

C/C++

Go

Rust

Python

Distributed systems

Low latency

Messaging systems

OMS/EMS knowledge

Job description

Your Role

Your job is to build Alpaca's proprietary set of services to meet our users' expectations for high quality and performance in their advisory service (Block Trading, Portfolio management, IRA, etc). 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 modelling 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)

• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
• Strong, experienced software engineer with Senior 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
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and/or high loaded financial transactional systems.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking