Software Engineer - Core Trading

Alpaca; Salem (OR); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Alpaca, a US-headquartered brokerage infrastructure provider, is seeking an experienced software engineer to help build our algo trading platform. You will focus on delivering high performance, low latency, and reliable services for thousands of users and clients worldwide.

In a small, fast-moving team, you will design and implement frontend and backend components, scale distributed systems, and shape data modeling and concurrency strategies to sustain growth and resilience.

Qualifications

• Experienced software engineer with lead experience preferred.
• Proficient in Go and C/C++.
• Proven ability to optimize for low latency and high throughput.
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers.
• Strong analytical, data-oriented mindset.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, scalability, high availability.
• System design skills with OO data modeling and SOA.

Responsibilities

• Build Alpaca's algo trading platform for high quality and performance.
• Design and architect the platform while wearing many hats in a small team.
• Write code across frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems.
• Incorporate CPU-level considerations for high throughput and robust concurrency.

Skills

Lead software engineer

Go

C/C++

Low latency

Message queues

Data analytics

Distributed systems

Databases

Concurrency control

System design

OO data modeling

SOA

High availability

Tools

FIX protocol

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.

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.

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred
• Coding skills in both low and high level languages around Go, C/C++
• 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 highly scalable distributed low latency systems.
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves)

• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading)
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.