Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Join Alpaca, a fast-growing fintech company, as a Senior Software Engineer and contribute to building and scaling the systems powering our stock and crypto trading platform. You will influence the architecture of our market data systems, design highly scalable systems, and obsess over latency. This role requires at least 4 years of experience with systems at scale, proficiency in compiled languages (like Go), and familiarity with databases, networking, and Linux. We offer competitive salaries, stock options, and comprehensive health benefits starting day one, along with a home-office setup stipend and monthly stipend. Alpaca is a globally distributed team with a passion for financial markets and open source contributions.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
• Experience with at least compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust, etc.). Most of our critical services are written in Go
• SQL or relational database skills
• Familiarity with TCP/IP, and UDP networking
• Proficient with Linux/BSD, and 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 market data systems
• Design highly scalable, mission-critical systems
• 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
• Cloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)
• Experience in building low-latency applications
• 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