Software Engineer - Core Trading

Alpaca; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health benefits

Home-office setup $500

Monthly stipend $150 via Brex Card

Job summary

Alpaca, a US-headquartered, global leader in broker‑age infrastructure, is seeking an experienced software engineer to build and scale its algo trading platform. You will design and implement across frontend, backend, databases, and distributed systems to deliver high‑quality, high‑throughput experiences for millions of brokerage accounts.

Joining an early‑stage startup with strong cloud, container, and observability practices, you will influence architecture, performance optimizations, and

Qualifications

• Seasoned software engineer with leadership experience.
• Proficient in Go and C/C++ with low-latency optimization.
• Experience with messaging queues and brokers.
• Strong data-driven, analytical mindset.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, scalability, and availability.
• System design skills including OO data modeling and SOA architectures.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build Alpaca's algo trading platform to deliver high performance.
• Write substantial code across frontend and backend, networks and databases.
• Make critical architectural decisions to ensure reliability and scale.

Skills

Lead experience

Go

C/C++

Low latency

Messaging queues

Data analytics

Distributed systems

Concurrency control

High availability

Databases

System design

OO data modeling

SOA

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Tools

GCP

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.

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.) 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.

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