Senior Software Engineer

About the role

Join Alpaca to build out our algorithmic trading platform, delivering a high-performance brokerage service to our users. This role offers a chance to architect and develop a foundational system, similar to joining early-stage AWS or Heroku. You will write significant amounts of code and make key decisions to shape the customer experience.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design and implement critical components of our algorithmic trading platform.
• Develop systems for high throughput and low latency.
• Contribute to the architecture of a distributed, highly available system.
• Model data structures for long-term system growth and maintainability.
• Write code in various languages to optimize performance and functionality.

Requirements

• Minimum 5 years of software engineering experience.
• Previous experience with trading or exchange systems (e.g., OMS, EMS, market making, algorithmic trading).
• Proficiency in at least one low-level language (C/C++, Zig, Rust) and one high-level language (Go, Java, Scala, Python).
• Demonstrated ability in optimizing for low latency and high throughput.
• Experience with messaging queues and brokers.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, distributed systems, scalability, high availability, databases, and concurrency control.
• Experience in system design, including object-oriented data modeling and service-oriented architectures.
• Experience developing and implementing Order Management Systems (OMS) or Risk Management Systems (RMS).

Nice to have

• Experience with algorithmic trading, professionally or personally.
• Familiarity with the FIX protocol.
• Experience with observability tools, tracing, continuous profiling, and benchmarking.
• Knowledge of financial markets (exchanges, broker-dealers, clearing).
• Experience with financial ledgers.
• Skills in statistical and quantitative analysis.
• Experience with major cloud platforms, particularly Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

Skills & tools

• C/C++, Go, Zig, Rust, Java, Scala, Python
• Messaging queues and brokers
• OMS, RMS
• GCP, Docker, Kubernetes (nice to have)
• FIX protocol (nice to have)

Practical notes

• Competitive salary and stock options.
• Health benefits.
• USD $500 one-time home-office setup stipend.
• USD $150 monthly stipend via Brex Card.
• Alpaca is an equal opportunity employer.