Staff Engineer / Team Lead - Market Data

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 team lead, you will help build and scale 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 market data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture of Alpaca connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. Oversee their public API structure and documentation on both streaming and historical endpoints. The team is responsible for building a cohesive developer-first API and is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production the new services, and libraries that overcome some of our greatest technical challenges as we continue to scale rapidly.

We are looking for a staff engineer level Team Lead who is keen on providing quality solutions, has proven experience building and architecting at scale, and 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. This demanding team also requires a deep understanding of POSIX-like operating systems, modern infrastructure, and orchestration practices.

Things You Get To Do:

• Own end-to-end architecture for the market data suite, ensuring scalability, modularity, and maintainability

• Drive technical planning, sprint scoping, and cross-functional alignment with product teams

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, foster engineering best practices

• Set and uphold standards for code quality, observability, and performance

• Collaborate with leadership on roadmap priorities, and help steer product evolution

• 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

• Participate in code reviews

• Troubleshoot 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):

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with 4+ years in a lead role

• Proven ability to design and scale complex distributed systems, preferably in Go

• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform

• Extensive knowledge relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL

• Familiarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networking

• Proficient with Linux/BSD, and shell scripting

• Experience with managing and maintaining large and complex code bases

• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Experience managing and mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional projects

• Strong problem-solving skills paired with a proactive mindset

• A preference for simple and elegant solutions

• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca

• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams

• Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)

• A passion for financial markets

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

• Experience in the finance industry

• Cloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)

• Experience with messaging queues and message brokers

• Experience integrating with external services

• Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking

• Knowledge of eBPF

• Experience working remotely

• Experience working at a startup

• DevOps mindset

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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