Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Join Alpaca, a fast-growing fintech company, as a Senior Software Engineer. You will play a crucial role in building and scaling the systems and services that power our stock and crypto trading platform, impacting millions of users. This role involves designing a highly scalable brokerage system, implementing backend services, and maintaining high software quality. You will collaborate with multiple teams, influence overall architecture, and troubleshoot incidents. Alpaca offers a competitive salary, stock options, and comprehensive benefits, including health insurance, a home-office setup stipend, and a monthly stipend.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (ex: Go, C, C++, Rust, Zig) or functional languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang, Elixir, Scala)
• SQL or relational database skills
• Familiarity with message brokers and message queues
• Proficient with Linux/BSD, shell scripting
• Excited about what we are building at Alpaca
• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
• Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration and scheduling systems (we primarily use Kubernetes via GKE)
• Experience with major cloud platforms (we primarily use GCP)
• A passion for financial markets

Responsibilities

• Influence the overall architecture of Alpaca’s systems
• Design a highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage system
• Obsess over latency (every nanosecond counts)
• Implement backend services and lead architecture where scalability and resilience matters
• Maintain good software quality and test coverage
• Participate in code reviews
• Troubleshooting on incidents and reported bugs
• You may be asked to be on-call to assist with engineering projects that are timely in nature

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of microservice architectures
• Knowledge of clean code principles
• DevOps mindset is an asset
• Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering, TCP/UDP)
• Experience with distributed Key Value stores
• Experience with CI/CD
• A passion for financial markets or the desire to learn
• Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Experience with observability, tracing, continuous profiling
• Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
• Knowledge of eBPF

Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Benefits: Health benefits start on day 1. In the US this includes Medical, Dental, Vision. In Canada, this includes supplemental health care. Internationally, this includes a stipend value to offset medical costs
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card
• Work with awesome hard working people, super smart and cool clients and innovative partners from around the world