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AlpacaAL

Staff Software Engineer, Core Trading

Alpaca builds financial services APIs for everyone globally.

Alpaca

Employee count: 201-500

AU, CN + 8 more

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Who We Are:

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

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, totalling over 6 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.

Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 230+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role:

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Core Trading Team. This is a high-impact technical role for someone who wants to remain deeply hands-on while shaping the architecture of our trading infrastructure. You will be the technical authority on low-latency systems, responsible for pushing the boundaries of performance, determinism, and scale across order routing, execution, and market connectivity.

You will not manage people directly — instead, you will lead through technical expertise, code quality, and design influence, mentoring others while continuing to be a principal contributor to mission-critical systems.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture, design, and technical roadmap of the core trading platform.
  • Lead initiatives on low-latency optimizations, deterministic performance, and resiliency.
  • Guide integration with exchanges and liquidity venues (FIX, OUCH, ITCH, proprietary APIs) at scale.
  • Establish best practices for high-frequency trading system development (testing, monitoring, incident response).
  • Partner with risk and compliance teams to embed real-time pre-trade risk, credit, and margin controls.
  • Act as a multiplier: mentor engineers, perform design reviews, and elevate engineering standards.
  • Lead architecture discussions and long-term system design for scalability and resilience.
  • Drive cross-team projects that impact multiple trading desks (e.g., global order routing, fault-tolerant market data infra).
  • Proactively identify scalability bottlenecks and lead refactoring/redesign initiatives.
  • Serve as a technical point of escalation for production trading issues.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in trading, fintech, or distributed systems.
  • Deep expertise in Go, C++, or Java, with a track record of building low-latency, high-throughput systems.
  • Strong foundation in operating systems internals, networking, and concurrency.
  • Demonstrated experience with architecture system design for trading systems.
  • Strong knowledge of messaging, storage, and distributed computation frameworks (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres, Aerospike).
  • Experience leading large-scale migrations/refactors in production-critical environments.
  • Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across multiple teams.

Preferred Skills

  • Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems.
  • Knowledge of cloud, containerization, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker).
  • Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
  • Contributions to open-source projects in systems programming or infrastructure.
  • Experience scaling engineering orgs and setting technical strategy

How We Take Care of You:

  • 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.

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About the job

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Posted on

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Senior

Hiring timezones

Australia +/- 0 hours, and 9 other timezones

About Alpaca

Learn more about Alpaca and their company culture.

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Alpaca builds financial services APIs for everyone globally. We bridge the gap between those who can access financial services and those who cannot, through inclusive technology.

We're a melting pot of diverse backgrounds from tech startup aficionados to individuals with deep financial experience. No matter your background or where you're from, we've got a role for you.

Build and scale your career

We're a team of ambitiously creative minds, set on delivering high quality and high impact results. We're always exploring and never satisfied with just enough. When problems get tough, we get energized and become even more laser-focused. We're keen on that last 10% of effort and believe that the details do matter. If this sounds like you, then you're in the right place.

Our teams are scaling and growing faster every day. If you're looking to challenge yourself and advance your career, Alpaca offers limitless opportunities. Are you ready to build with us?

Unwavering, goal-oriented culture

Our teams are goal-oriented. We care about doing the work and solving the problem together. We welcome questions from all levels because we know that no one knows all the answers. Your goal isn't to be the smartest in the room. Your goal is to help solve problems no one has solved before by driving impact in areas you're strongest. And with a positive mindset, we set out to own the unknown and thrive in situations where we have to learn to succeed.

Our goal together is to make sure that the right questions are heard no matter who they come from, and the right solutions are built no matter who builds them.

Global mindset, globally distributed

We are living in unprecedented times - our global economy is tightly interwoven while constantly expanding and transforming. The future of financial innovation will never belong to just one country. As we work to provide access to financial services for everyone on the planet, it's important for us to build a global team of agile talent with vibrantly diverse cultural experiences.

Our teams are not just global, we're also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica). By joining Alpaca you'll be part of a multicultural, international organization.

Radical, honest, and empathy-driven

We're a startup with products that are disrupting an old industry. We see the opportunity and it's clear to us that our impact is going to be massive. We want to be a team that's ready for the ups and downs. We move fast and try our best to bring honesty and clarity when we communicate. Each of us brings to the table unique life experiences and diverse backgrounds - these experiences are valued and we don't take it for granted. We want to learn about you and want you to learn about us, working together to build empathy every step of the way.

In order for us to achieve our goal of providing access to financial services for everyone on the planet, it is critical for us to maintain high-trust partnerships and act with honesty and empathy. During this journey together, we'll be learning about the world together, through our relationships with each other. This is just the beginning and we would love to work with you!

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at Alpaca.

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Monthly Brex Card Stipend

Employees receive a monthly USD $150 stipend on a Brex card for additional work-related expenses.

Competitive Salary & Equity

Alpaca offers competitive salaries alongside stock options, ensuring employees share in the company's success.

Home-Office Setup Stipend

Alpaca provides a one-time USD $500 for home-office setup to create a comfortable and productive work environment.

Immediate Health Benefits

Health benefits at Alpaca start on day 1, covering medical, dental, and vision. In Canada, supplemental health care is included, and internationally, a stipend is provided to offset medical costs.

View Alpaca's employee benefits
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