Staff Margin & Risk - Real-Time Systems Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

New Hire Home-Office Setup: USD $500

Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month

Job summary

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of the Margin & Risk team within Prime Engine. You will own architecture for cross-asset margin, real-time risk, and margin-call lifecycles, building scalable, low-latency systems that protect customers and partners.

You will not manage people but will mentor engineers, review designs, and serve as the senior technical anchor as the team grows from about six to ten engineers, collaborating with PM and operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience with ownership of a production system.
• Proven ownership of a high-volume system where data integrity or user impact is critical.
• Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems.
• Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java/C++/Rust with willingness to work in Go.
• Relational databases experience (PostgreSQL preferred) and knowledge of transactions and concurrency.
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ) and Kubernetes.
• Care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollouts.
• Strong communication with engineers, operations, and compliance partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes.
• Design and build services that translate complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, observable systems.
• Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety.
• Drive reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation.
• Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams to define boundaries and integration points.
• Set the standard for correctness in a financial system: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts.
• Lead design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows.
• Act as a technical escalation point for production margin and risk issues and drive durable prevention after incidents.

Skills

Backend systems

Go

Java/C++/Rust

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Kafka/RabbitMQ

Latency optimization

Mentorship

Communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Kubernetes

Job description

Alpaca is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of the Margin & Risk team within Prime Engine. You will own architecture for cross-asset margin, real-time risk, and margin-call lifecycles, building scalable, low-latency systems that protect customers and partners.

You will not manage people but will mentor engineers, review designs, and serve as the senior technical anchor as the team grows from about six to ten engineers, collaborating with PM and operations.