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 Alpaca's trading platform, impacting millions of users. This role involves designing highly scalable, mission-critical brokerage systems, implementing backend services, and maintaining high software quality. You will collaborate with multiple teams, influence overall architecture, and troubleshoot incidents. Alpaca offers competitive salaries, 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 matter
• 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