Staff Software Engineer, Alpaca

• 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years
• Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction
• Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems
• Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go. Domain knowledge matters more than prior time in Go
• Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency
• Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC or other RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes
• Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout
• Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined
• Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Curious about the core of the domain, and effective as a teammate

Desirable

• We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of our Margin & Risk team, part of Prime Engine. The team builds the systems that protect Alpaca, our partners, and their customers from financial exposure across every asset class the platform supports — equities, options, and crypto today, and new asset classes as the platform expands
• These systems calculate margin requirements, enforce real-time risk and exposure limits, manage margin calls through their full lifecycle, and automate operational workflows that were historically manual or split across fragmented services
• This role is expected to work across those asset classes, not own a single product line: portfolio and intraday margin, options risk, crypto risk controls, and the margin models for new products as they come online. Exposure is often cross-asset, so the architecture has to treat a customer's risk as one picture
• This is a high-consequence domain. A defect can cause financial loss, incorrectly restrict a customer's trading, or create regulatory exposure. Latency matters, and correctness matters more. We are looking for an engineer who has owned systems like this before — including what happens when they fail — and who has built that kind of system, not only operated one someone else designed
• You will not manage people directly. You will lead through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship, and you will remain a principal contributor on mission-critical systems. The team is about six engineers today and is scaling toward ten
• You will be the senior technical anchor for the domain, working with the engineering manager and the senior engineers on the team to spread deep ownership as it grows
• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes
• Design and build services that turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems, and keep those rules consistent where asset classes interact
• Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety
• Drive reliability and performance across the team's services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation
• Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries
• Set the standard for correctness in a financial system: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts
• Lead design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows
• Act as a technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents