Senior Backend Engineer, Ledger Team at Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. As a licensed financial services company, Alpaca serves hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries, including broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, managing over 10 million brokerage accounts. Their diverse global team is committed to open-source contributions and enhancing their award-winning, developer-friendly API and robust infrastructure. Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors.

The team comprises 400+ globally distributed members working from various locations including the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, and the UK. Alpaca seeks passionate individuals who align with their core values: Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable, to contribute to their rapid growth.

Your Role as a Senior Backend Engineer

As a Senior Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the core systems and services that power Alpaca, enabling millions of users to trade billions of dollars worth of assets. The Ledger Team specifically builds a modern ledger system, which serves as the definitive record of all account activities. This system is critical for financial reporting, informed decision-making, and regulatory compliance, acting as the source of truth for numerous services within the Alpaca ecosystem. Alpaca is looking for an experienced engineer dedicated to delivering defect-free, scalable solutions, who is proactive in challenging conventions and voicing opinions. This role offers the autonomy to design and implement solutions for defined goals, with active participation in goal definition alongside a cross-functional team.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders, including finance, operations, and product teams, to deliver high-impact features and projects.
• Build backend systems and components with a focus on integrity, maintainability, scalability, and stability.
• Take ownership of the delivery of high-visibility features and projects, from initial design to successful deployment.
• Work with other engineering teams to enhance the overall health and performance of Alpaca’s systems.

Required Qualifications

• A seasoned engineer with 5+ years of experience working on systems at scale.
• Obsessed with crafting performant, defect-free, and maintainable code.
• A strong problem solver with a proactive and innovative mindset.
• An effective collaborator capable of aligning both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working independently or collaboratively on complex problems.
• Strong coding skills, with a preference for Go (Golang).
• Ability to debug issues efficiently and, ideally, foresee and prevent problems entirely.
• Experience with Interface Definition Languages (IDLs) such as protobuf, Remote Procedure Call (RPC) frameworks like gRPC, cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and relational databases like PostgreSQL.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience within the financial services or accounting industry.
• Familiarity with distributed systems and databases.
• Experience with event-driven systems and messaging brokers (e.g., Redpanda).
• Prior experience working in a remote environment.
• Experience working at a startup.

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive Salary and Stock Options.
• Comprehensive Health Benefits.
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: A one-time USD $500 stipend.
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card.

Alpaca is an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to fostering a diverse workforce. For more details, refer to their Recruitment Privacy Policy.