Senior 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 C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision. We serve hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs and have over 6 million brokerage accounts. Our team of 230+ globally distributed members works remotely from locations such as the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, and the UK.

We are 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.

Senior Software Engineer on the Core Trading Team. Design and maintain the critical infrastructure that powers our trading systems – from order routing and execution engines to market connectivity and real-time risk controls. Work closely with traders, quants, and other engineers to deliver high-performance, reliable, and scalable trading platforms in high-stakes, low-latency environments.

• Design and implement high-performance trading infrastructure, including order management systems, execution gateways, and market data distribution.
• Optimize low-latency systems for throughput, determinism, and fault tolerance.
• Integrate with global exchanges, brokers, and ECNs, ensuring robust FIX, FAST, OUCH, and ITCH connectivity.
• Build real-time risk checks and margin controls aligned with compliance requirements.
• Develop and maintain core libraries, APIs, and frameworks used across trading desks.
• Collaborate with quants and traders to prototype and product ionise new strategies.
• Monitor, debug, and optimise production systems to ensure high availability and rapid recovery.
• Mentor junior engineers and set engineering standards for code quality, testing, and deployment.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in trading, fintech, or high-performance systems.
• Strong programming skills in Go, C++, or Java; experience with Python.
• Deep understanding of operating systems, networking, and concurrency.
• Proven experience in low-latency optimisation and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with FIX, OUCH, ITCH, or other trading protocols.
• Experience building distributed, fault-tolerant systems.
• Solid knowledge of databases, caching, and messaging systems (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ).
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ability to work under pressure.

• Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems.
• Knowledge of cloud, containerisation, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• Contributions to open-source projects in systems programming or infrastructure.

• Competitive salary and 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.