Alpaca is an API infrastructure and licensed financial services company that allows developers and businesses to offer stock and crypto investing to their end-customers. We work with more than 100 companies across the globe to enable their investing products, and our mission is to provide financial services to everyone on the planet.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists and backed by a group of well-capitalized investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investors and founders. We are also very tech-enthusiastic with notable track records in open source and startup communities.

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a fast-growing series B fintech company that’s raised over $120 million in funding.
Alpaca is an API-first stock and crypto platform that enables developers and businesses across the world to build trading algorithms, applications, and brokerage services.
Our globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage specialists, and is backed by a group of prominent investors and highly experienced industry angel investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Eldridge, Positive Sum, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

And, of course, we are very enthusiastic about open source contributions as well as community building.

The Alpaca Team:

We have 150+ globally distributed (remote) team members who love to work from their favorite places in the world. We have team members based in the USA, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Philippines, Nigeria, UK, and more! We love candidates who have a passion for making a global difference in financial services and technology, by impacting local communities and becoming a part of our hyper-growth company.

Your Role:

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The Ledger Team is responsible for building a modern ledger system, whose purpose is to maintain a complete and correct view of everything that has ever happened in every account. From a business perspective, the ledger provides a structured and organized system for recording and aggregating transactional data. It plays a crucial role in supporting financial reporting, decision-making, and compliance. From an engineering perspective, the ledger serves as the source of truth for many services in the Alpaca ecosystem.

For this role, we are seeking an experienced engineer who is obsessed with delivering defect-free solutions, has proven experience architecting and building at scale, and who is not afraid of challenging conventions or voicing their opinions. In this role, you will have the autonomy to design and implement solutions to achieve defined goals while actively participating in defining those goals in cooperation with a cross-functional team.

Things You Get To Do:

Collaborate with internal stakeholders–including finance, operations, and product teams–to deliver high-impact features/projects
Build backend systems/components with integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability in mind
Own the delivery of high-visibility features/projects, from design to deployment
Collaborate with engineering teams to improve the health of Alpaca’s systems

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

A seasoned engineer, with 5+ years experience working on systems at scale
Obsessed with performant, defect-free, maintainable code
A strong problem solver with a proactive mindset
A collaborator who is capable of creating alignment with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike
Comfortable working heads-down or tag-teaming problems
Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
Ability to debug issues or, better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
Experience with IDLs (e.g., protobuf), RPC frameworks (e.g., gRPC), cloud platforms (e.g., GCP), and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL)

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

Experience in the financial services or accounting industry
Experience with distributed systems/databases
Experience with event driven systems and messaging brokers (e.g., Redpanda)
Experience working remotely
Experience working at a startup

How We Take Care of You:

Competitive Salary & Stock Options
Benefits: Health benefits start on day 1. In the US this includes Medical, Dental, Vision. In Canada, this includes supplemental health care. Internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs.
New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
Work with awesome hard working people, super smart and cool clients and innovative partners from around the world

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.

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TECH STACK

Go, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, React, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis

ENGINEERING TEAM AND PROCESSES

Our engineering team process is somewhere between scrum and kanban. We do daily standup every morning and manage project progress with JIRA. All the code reviews are done in GitHub and release process is seamlessly built around Google Cloud Build, Google Container Registry, GKE, etc. Everyone is encouraged to review others code and have transparent access to any information to improve products from any aspect.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

We have built MarketStore (https://github.com/alpacahq/marketstore) in Go from scratch that is time-series database designed for financial data and made it open source. The challenge in our trading system is that you need to deal with real-time market environment to minimize latency while you need to make sure things work correctly as money management system. The requirements and system architecture are totally different and unique which is very exciting to tackle.