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 software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users that are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

The identity team is responsible for building a modern platform for onboarding users, verifying their identity, evaluating risk, and managing their trading accounts. These persons, businesses and accounts are foundational components of the Alpaca system, and we need to build new capabilities while achieving very high automation rates. We are expanding the platform to handle identity verification on a global basis, and to support our growing set of account types.

We are looking for senior engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, proven experience building and architecting at scale, and 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. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices are also great assets we actively look for.

Things You Get To Do:

• Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely on
• Help us create a global financial identity verification and risk management service
• Implement backend services and work on designing an architecture where reliability matters
• Take ownership of tasks, identify and address technical challenges proactively, and propose innovative solutions
• Contribute to architectural decisions, offering insights and suggestions for designing scalable and reliable systems
• Work with other teams to improve how our systems interact with theirs and improve Alpaca systems in general
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset
• Ability to turn business requirements into a flexible implementation model
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team
• A preference for simple and elegant solutions
• At least 3 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Proven experience in building and maintaining microservices
• Strong coding skills, preferably in Go
• Ability to write clean, well tested, and maintainable code
• Experience with domain driven design and event driven design
• Ability to debug issues or better yet, foresee problems and avoid them entirely
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies, especially Kubernetes
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform
• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers
• Experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Experience in the finance industry
• Experience with financial identity management, e.g. KYC
• Experience integrating with external services
• Experience working remotely
• Experience working at a startup
• DevOps mindset is an asset

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.