Staff Engineer, Margin & Risk Platform

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health benefits

One-time home-office setup

Monthly Brex stipend

Job summary

Alpaca, a US-headquartered leader in brokerage infrastructure, seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Margin & Risk team. You will own architectures across assets, building real-time risk controls and margin models while coordinating with product and operations.

You will mentor engineers and drive durable, correct systems that withstand production challenges. The role emphasizes latency-conscious design, cross-asset exposure, and a path to scale a six-to-ten person team into broader ownership,

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience.
• Ownership of high-volume systems with potential financial impact.
• Experience in transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems.
• Go strong, or Java/C++/Rust with Go willingness.
• Relational databases, PostgreSQL, transactions, concurrency.
• Event-driven systems (gRPC/Kafka/RabbitMQ) and Kubernetes.
• Care for correctness: testing, edge cases, safe production rollout.
• Clear communication with engineers, ops, and compliance.
• Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes.
• Design services turning margin methodologies into correct, testable systems.
• Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path balancing latency and safety.
• Drive reliability and performance across services: throughput and recovery.
• Collaborate with Product, Ops, Compliance to define behavior and boundaries.
• Set standards for transactional integrity, idempotency, and feature flags.
• Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and raise engineering bar.
• Escalate production margin and risk issues and drive durable prevention.

Skills

Go

Java

C++

Rust

Kubernetes

gRPC

Kafka

Observability

Tools

PostgreSQL

Temporal

RabbitMQ

Git

Job description

Alpaca, a US-headquartered leader in brokerage infrastructure, seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Margin & Risk team. You will own architectures across assets, building real-time risk controls and margin models while coordinating with product and operations.

You will mentor engineers and drive durable, correct systems that withstand production challenges. The role emphasizes latency-conscious design, cross-asset exposure, and a path to scale a six-to-ten person team into broader ownership,