Senior Software Engineer - Market Data

About the Position

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer - Market Data to join our team at Alpaca, a US-headquartered, global leader in brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

Who We Are:

Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're 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.

Our Team Members:

We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond!

As a senior software engineer, you will help build and scale the systems and services that form the foundation of Alpaca and empower millions of users who are trading billions of dollars worth of assets.

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

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
• 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
• Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams

Nice to Have

• Experience with Market Data
• 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

We Offer

• Competitive Salary & 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.

About the Company

Alpaca is a global leader in brokerage infrastructure, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. Our mission is to open financial services to everyone on the planet. 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.