Alpaca · 1 month ago
Staff Software Engineer, Core Trading
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
10+ years expAlpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for various financial services. They are seeking a Staff Engineer for their Core Trading Team, responsible for the architecture and technical roadmap of the trading platform, focusing on low-latency systems and performance optimizations.
Developer APIsFinancial ServicesFinTechTrading Platform
Responsibilities
Own the architecture, design, and technical roadmap of the core trading platform
Lead initiatives on low-latency optimizations, deterministic performance, and resiliency
Guide integration with exchanges and liquidity venues (FIX, OUCH, ITCH, proprietary APIs) at scale
Establish best practices for high-frequency trading system development (testing, monitoring, incident response)
Partner with risk and compliance teams to embed real-time pre-trade risk, credit, and margin controls
Act as a multiplier: mentor engineers, perform design reviews, and elevate engineering standards
Lead architecture discussions and long-term system design for scalability and resilience
Drive cross-team projects that impact multiple trading desks (e.g., global order routing, fault-tolerant market data infra)
Proactively identify scalability bottlenecks and lead refactoring/redesign initiatives
Serve as a technical point of escalation for production trading issues
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent
10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time in trading, fintech, or distributed systems
Deep expertise in Go, C++, or Java, with a track record of building low-latency, high-throughput systems
Strong foundation in operating systems internals, networking, and concurrency
Demonstrated experience with architecture & system design for trading systems
Strong knowledge of messaging, storage, and distributed computation frameworks (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Postgres, Aerospike)
Experience leading large-scale migrations/refactors in production-critical environments
Proven track record of mentorship and technical leadership across multiple teams
Preferred
Experience with equities, derivatives, or FX trading systems
Knowledge of cloud, containerization, and orchestration tools (Kubernetes, Docker)
Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
Contributions to open-source projects in systems programming or infrastructure
Experience scaling engineering orgs and setting technical strategy
Benefits
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
Company
Alpaca
Alpaca is a financial system platform that allows developers and businesses to build apps, embed investing, and trade algorithms.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Alpaca has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2020 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$138.8MKey Investors
SBI GroupPortage VenturesSpark Capital
2025-04-23Series C· $52M
2023-10-12Convertible Note· $15M
2021-08-30Series B· $50M
Leadership Team
Yoshi Yokokawa
Co-Founder and CEO
Hitoshi Harada
CPO and Co-Founder
Recent News
Morningstar.com
2026-01-07
2025-12-17
2025-12-09
Company data provided by crunchbase