Staff Full-Stack Engineer: Trading API Architect & Stock Options

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

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

New Hire Home-Office Setup

Monthly Stipend

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to lead the technical direction of the Trading API team. You will own identity, access control, and customer-facing features across the stack, partnering with product and design to ship secure, scalable trading applications.

You will champion architecture, mentor engineers, and drive migrations from monolith endpoints to backend services, ensuring reliable, real-time data delivery and robust security controls for customers and institutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with ownership of backend and frontend systems.
• Production system ownership with potential data exposure risk.
• Deep experience with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, session/token management, MFA, and permission models.
• Strong backend in Go; or Java/Kotlin/C#/Rust with willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Strong frontend in TypeScript/React; real-time data via WebSockets preferred.
• Relational DBs (PostgreSQL), API design (REST/gRPC), Kubernetes-based services.
• Care for correctness and security: threat modelling, testing, and safe rollouts.
• Clear communication across engineers, product, design, compliance, and security.
• Track record of technical leadership and mentorship; product-minded.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture and technical roadmap for Trading API access, identity, and permissions.
• Design complex account structures with explicit, auditable permissions.
• Lead delivery of next-gen Trading API applications including real-time data, order entry, and views.
• Drive migration from legacy monolith endpoints to a dedicated backend with clear API contracts.
• Set security standards for sessions, MFA, OAuth flows, and safe performance.
• Establish safe delivery practices: feature flags, staged rollouts, testing, observability.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Compliance, Security, and adjacent teams on boundaries.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers, raising engineering standards.
• Act as escalation point for production issues in customer-facing systems.

Skills

OAuth 2.0

TypeScript/React

Go

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

REST

gRPC

Security

Tools

Auth0

Keycloak

Amazon Cognito

WebAuthn

Job description

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to lead the technical direction of the Trading API team. You will own identity, access control, and customer-facing features across the stack, partnering with product and design to ship secure, scalable trading applications.

You will champion architecture, mentor engineers, and drive migrations from monolith endpoints to backend services, ensuring reliable, real-time data delivery and robust security controls for customers and institutions.