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Join Alpaca as a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our Margin & Risk team, focusing on building systems that protect against financial exposure across various asset classes.
Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. 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, totaling over 10 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.
- 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 turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems, and keep those rules consistent where asset classes interact.
- 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 (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries.
- 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 point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents.
- 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years.
- Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction.
- Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems.
- Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go.
- Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency.
- Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC or other RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes.
- Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout.
- Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined.
- Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Curious about the core of the domain, and effective as a teammate.
- 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.