Senior Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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 6 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 top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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:

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer to join our Core Trading Team. This team is responsible for designing and maintaining the critical infrastructure that powers our trading systems – from order routing and execution engines to market connectivity and real-time risk controls. You will work closely with traders, quants, and other engineers to deliver high-performance, reliable, and scalable trading platforms.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in high-stakes, low-latency environments, has strong systems-level engineering experience, and enjoys tackling performance bottlenecks and large-scale distributed systems problems.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and implement high-performance trading infrastructure, including order management systems, execution gateways, and market data distribution.
• Optimize low-latency systems for throughput, determinism, and fault tolerance.
• Integrate with global exchanges, brokers, and ECNs, ensuring robust FIX/FAST/OUCH/ITCH connectivity.
• Build real-time risk checks and margin controls aligned with compliance requirements.
• Develop and maintain core libraries, APIs, and frameworks used across trading desks.
• Collaborate with quants and traders to prototype and productionize new strategies.
• Monitor, debug, and optimize production systems to ensure high availability and rapid recovery.
• Mentor junior engineers and set engineering standards for code quality, testing, and deployment.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in trading, fintech, or high-performance systems.
• Strong programming skills in Go, C++, or Java; Python experience.
• Deep understanding of operating systems, networking, and concurrency.
• Proven experience in low-latency optimization and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with FIX, OUCH, ITCH, or other trading protocols.
• Experience building distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
• Solid knowledge of databases, caching, and messaging systems (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ability to work under pressure.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems.
• Knowledge of cloud, containerization, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Contributions to open-source projects in systems programming or infrastructure.

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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