Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Overview

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 D funding round brought our total investment to over $320 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 9 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 are a dynamic group of 230+ globally distributed professionals spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

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.

• 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, Rabbit
  
  MQ, Redis, Postgres, Aerospike).
• Experience leading large-scale migrations/refactors in production-critical environments.
• Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across multiple teams.

• 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.

• 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