Staff Software Engineer, Alpaca

• 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
• 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

Desirable

• We are seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Risk and Margin 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
• Own the architecture, design, and technical roadmap of the risk and margin 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