About the Company
Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. We are a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet.
Responsibilities
- Lead the team building Alpaca's algo trading platform
- Design and architect the platform, wearing many different hats in a small team
- Write code and make critical technical decisions
- Own the team's roadmap, delivery, and development of engineers
- Set technical direction and architecture for the team's services
- Break down ambiguous business goals into scoped, sequenced engineering work
- Manage day-to-day execution: sprint planning, unblocking engineers, keeping work visible
- Ensure code and design quality through reviews, design docs, and own contributions
- Own production: reliability, latency, correctness targets, on-call health, incident follow-through
- Handle people management: hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, feedback, performance, career growth
- Collaborate cross-team with product, operations, compliance, clearing, and other engineering teams
Requirements
- Strong, experienced software engineer at senior or staff level who has led a team
- Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: mentoring, feedback, raising the level of people
- Track record of delivering complex systems on schedule
- Coding skills in low and high level languages: C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python
- Low latency and high throughput optimization
- Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
- Analytical data-oriented mindset and skills
- Knowledge of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, low latency systems, concurrency control
- System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
- Experience with Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)
- Clear written and verbal communication, including with non-engineering stakeholders
- Comfort operating with ambiguity and limited process
Nice to Have
- Experience hiring and building out an engineering team from a small base
- Experience owning a production trading or brokerage system as accountable lead
- Algo trading experience
- FIX protocol knowledge
- Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling, benchmarking
- Financial market knowledge
- Experience with financial ledgers
- Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
- Experience with major cloud platforms (GCP)
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
- Experience working with distributed, remote-first teams across time zones