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:

Alpaca is a next generation securities broker for algo traders.  With a clear vision and the right timing, we are a growing FinTech startup tapping into a new market in retail trading.  Our target users are tech savvy and analytical problem solvers who appreciate a modern technology stack and an innovative business model that helps to empower them to move beyond old school financial services. We look for engineers who think the same way.

Your job is to build Alpaca's algo trading platform to satisfy our users who expect high quality and performance from their brokerage service.  This opportunity is similar to joining AWS or Heroku in their early days,  designing and architecting our platform by wearing many different hats in our small team. As an experienced engineer, you will write tons of code and make critical decisions about delivering the best experience to our customers.  This certainly requires deep knowledge in both frontend and backend, databases and distributed systems, as well as broad experience from low to high level in CPU-level hardware for high throughput, robust concurrency system design, abstract distributed system architecture for high availability and object-oriented data modeling with long term growth in mind. Joining an early stage startup, the payoff to this highly demanding environment will be worth the effort.

You must have previous software engineering experience with trading or exchange systems (OMS, EMS, exchanges, market making, algorithmic trading, quant trading).

Requirements:

• Strong, experienced software engineer with lead experience is preferred
• Coding skills in both low and high level languages around 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 and concurrency control
• System design skills with object-oriented data modeling, service-oriented architectures, system abstraction
• Experience with the development and implementation of Order Management systems (OMS) and Risk Management systems (RMS)

Nice to have:

• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• FIX protocol knowledge
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling and benchmarking
• Financial market (exchange, broker-dealers, clearing, etc.) knowledge
• Experience with financial ledgers
• Statistical and quantitative analysis skills
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes

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.