Staff Software Engineer

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 D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 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 9 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!

Your Role

As a Staff Software Engineer at Alpaca Middle East, you will be a strategic technical leader responsible for architecting, designing, and establishing the foundational software systems that power Alpaca's financial infrastructure in the region. Your primary responsibility will be setting the technical direction for our software engineering practices, establishing architectural standards and patterns, and ensuring our systems meet regulatory compliance requirements while maintaining world-class reliability, scalability, and performance.

You will demonstrate exceptional technical depth and breadth across software engineering, serving as the recognized expert in system design, architecture, and performance optimization.

You will independently lead complex, multi-team software initiatives, resolve systemic issues that impact the entire organization, and establish high standards for quality through innovative design solutions and engineering excellence. Your influence extends across the entire engineering organization, shaping software strategy, setting organizational processes and standards, and driving long-term technical vision.

In addition to software development, you will establish strategic approaches for infrastructure coordination with regional deployments and cloud or data center operations as needed for UAE and Saudi markets. While day-to-day infrastructure work may be performed, you will define infrastructure coordination frameworks.

Things You Get To Do

Software Architecture and Strategic Development

• Architect and establish foundational software systems using Go or similar languages, setting technical direction for organizational software development
• Design and establish event-driven architectures, message queues, and asynchronous processing patterns that serve as organizational standards
• Build and maintain APIs, services, and integrations that power Alpaca's financial infrastructure, establishing architectural patterns and best practices
• Optimize system performance at scale, identifying bottlenecks and implementing efficient solutions that influence organizational performance standards

Technical Leadership and Strategic Expertise

• Demonstrate exceptional technical competency recognized across the organization and industry, serving as the ultimate authority across multiple areas including design, architecture, and performance optimization
• Lead complex, multi-team software initiatives from conception to delivery, establishing organizational standards and best practices
• Resolve systemic issues that impact the entire organization, applying deep technical knowledge and innovative problem-solving approaches

Infrastructure Coordination and Strategic Management

• Establish infrastructure coordination frameworks and strategies with DevOps and vendors for regional deployments.
• Define organizational approaches for ensuring infrastructure meets software requirements, operational standards, and local data residency or regulatory requirements
• Establish vendor management strategies for infrastructure services, ensuring service level agreements (SLAs) are met and defining organizational vendor relationship standards

Mentoring and Organizational Knowledge Sharing

• Actively mentor engineers across all levels (junior, intermediate, and senior), fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement across the organization
• Provide strategic technical guidance and architectural review feedback that helps engineers grow their skills and make better technical decisionn

Organizational Influence and Strategic Collaboration

• Influence software practices, project direction, and cross-team collaborations across the entire engineering organization
• Play a leading role in setting organizational processes and standards, shaping long-term software strategies and technical vision

Strategic Project Execution

• Own the outcome of strategic initiatives that span multiple teams, ensuring they meet quality standards, timelines, and strategic business objectives
• Break down complex organizational problems into manageable initiatives and coordinate execution across multiple teams

Who You Are (Must-Haves)

Technical Excellence

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record of architecting and building complex, production systems at scale
• Exceptional technical competency recognized across the organization and industry, with deep expertise across multiple areas including design, architecture, and performance optimization
• Expert-level mastery of Go or similar backend languages, with exceptional system design and architecture skills, and the ability to establish organizational architectural standards
• Proven track record of building scalable, high-availability applications that handle complex business logic and high transaction volumes, with experience establishing organizational scalability patterns
• Deep understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and system design principles, with the ability to establish organizational engineering practices
• Extensive experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, pub/sub systems, and asynchronous processing patterns, with the ability to establish organizational architectural patterns

Leadership and Organizational Influence

• Demonstrated leadership within executive and strategic discussions, recognized as the ultimate authority on challenging technical issues across the organization
• Proven ability to influence organizational practices, strategic project direction, and cross-team collaborations at the highest levels
• Experience playing a leading role in setting organizational processes and standards, shaping long-term software strategies and technical vision

Problem-Solving and Quality

• Exhibits exceptional problem-solving abilities and consistently drives organizational quality improvements
• Obsession with performant, defect-free, maintainable code and systems, establishing organizational quality standards

Communication and Strategic Collaboration

• Exceptional communication skills to collaborate effectively with team members, stakeholders, cross-functional teams, and executive leadership
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership, influencing strategic decisions

Learning and Growth

• Drives organizational learning and experimentation, pioneering adoption of cutting-edge technologies and establishing organizational technical direction
• Stays current with industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies, sharing insights that influence organizational strategy
• Actively seeks out new knowledge and applies innovative solutions to problems that impact the entire organization

Domain Knowledge (Preferred)

• Experience working with financial systems, APIs, or fintech applications
• Understanding of financial transaction processing, accounting principles, or regulatory compliance
• Familiarity with domain-driven design and event-driven design patterns
• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and service-oriented architectures

Who You Might Be (Nice-To-Haves)

• Experience coordinating infrastructure provisioning activities or working with cloud and data center environments in regulated markets
• Experience managing vendor relationships for infrastructure services, including cloud providers and data center vendors
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like Terraform and GitOps practices
• Understanding of Kubernetes orchestration, networking concepts, and infrastructure monitoring tools
• Experience with infrastructure deployment in regulated environments or data residency requirements (e.g., UAE, Saudi Arabia)
• Experience in the financial services or fintech industry
• Experience working with Middle East financial markets (UAE, DIFC, Saudi Arabia / Tadawul, CMA)
• Experience with regulatory compliance in the region (DFSA, SCA, CMA, ISO 27001, SOC 2)

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