Senior Software Engineer - Clearing

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:

As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form Alpaca's foundation and empower millions of users who trade billions of dollars worth of assets.

The clearing team is responsible for building a modern clearing and settlements platform. Alpaca participates in a market where over two trillion dollars worth of equities need to be cleared and settled daily. We are tackling the industry with a modern approach to building highly scalable, event-driven systems where resilient engineering, scale, and performance can have critical advantages.

We have exciting plans for the team. Self-clearing is just the first step in building end-to-end financial infrastructure as we continue to prove ourselves as innovative market leaders and a core component of our growth across global markets and asset classes.

We are looking for senior engineers keen on providing quality solutions, with great fundamentals, proven experience building and architecting at scale, and fearlessness in 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 determining those goals. An understanding of cloud-based modern architecture, infrastructure, and orchestration practices is also a great asset we are actively looking for.

Things You Get To Do:

• Contribute to a core system that millions of end users will rely on

• Work on self-clearing and help us join the elite club of self-clearing brokers

• 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

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

• The 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):

• Previous experience in the financial industry or knowledge of clearing and settlement processes

• Experience with DTCC integration

• Experience working remotely

• Experience working at a startup

• DevOps mindset is an asset

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.

Recruitment Privacy Policy