Senior Software Engineer - Clearing Remote - Europe at Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, and 24/5 trading. Through our subsidiaries, Alpaca operates as a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. This clientele includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 10 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals dedicated to opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We are deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community while continuously enhancing our award winning, developer friendly API and robust infrastructure. Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding from top tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

Our team comprises over 400 globally distributed members who thrive working from their preferred locations worldwide, with colleagues spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We are seeking passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If your values align with ours - Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable - and you are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role: Senior Software Engineer, Clearing Team

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Clearing team, you will focus on the critical operations that occur after a trade is executed. Much of this work is back end, although we do maintain some user facing systems. This team is central to our achievements in becoming self clearing in US equities and US options. We are expanding beyond this, and there are always new integrations and product offerings to build. In addition to core clearing, we work on securities finance related functions and build the infrastructure needed to launch new products like Fully Paid Securities Lending. Additional exciting initiatives are also in development.

What You Will Do

• Work within a team that values quality of thinking, excellence in execution, practical solutions, and a willingness to take responsibility over tenure, hierarchy, or arguing about theoretical matters.
• Take ownership of projects from initial idea through to deployment, effectively navigating ambiguity to build what is truly necessary, not just what is requested.
• Design and build new systems that enable new company products or unlock revenue streams.
• Refine our existing systems. We believe in constant improvement as long as the outcome is meaningful and tangible.
• Gain deep knowledge into components instrumental in maintaining healthy and functioning financial markets.
• Observe how a company like Alpaca operates, gaining insight behind the scenes and collaborating with talented colleagues across different teams. You will also have the opportunity to influence our direction.
• Participate in our on call rotation to ensure system reliability. We value our free time and prioritize eliminating issues that cause team friction.

Who You Are (Must Haves)

• You take seriously the fact that we operate systems holding people's hard earned money.
• You possess a strong interest in how traditional financial markets function.
• You can take the lead on projects. We will define the problem or feature, and you will drive the execution.
• You take personal and collective responsibility for your work. If an issue arises and you are the only one available, you take action instead of deflecting.
• You know which design choices are critical and which can be adjusted as we learn more about real world operations.
• You know when you do not know something and actively seek that knowledge rather than guessing or relying on an LLM for thought processes.
• You are not rigidly attached to your ideas. If new information surfaces, you can pivot and focus on what matters most.
• You are motivated by the long term impact of your decisions and are keen to take on increasingly large efforts, leveraging gained expertise. We value engineers who remain to see their systems scale and evolve.
• You have startup experience, understanding that perfection is not the immediate goal, and you are instrumental in guiding the team towards that goal while recognizing business priorities can shift based on market needs.
• You are capable of constructive pushback in a professional manner, and you can accept decisions even if they differ from your initial thoughts. You are welcome to explain your disagreement.
• You have strong attention to detail.
• You possess good foundational knowledge of computer science principles, including how the internet, databases, and distributed systems work, both when they function correctly and when they fail.
• You are comfortable that we are deep in the details without listing all technologies yet, as you are ready to build and grow in a strong environment.
• You are productive with the following technologies: Golang, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.
• You have 5 or more years of hands on experience building reliable and distributed systems.
• You can design effective (RESTful) APIs and can critically evaluate poor API designs.

Who You Might Be (Nice to Haves)

• Experience in our specific domain: securities clearing & settlement, securities finance.
• Experience with: gRPC, Protobuf, Temporal, Grafana, Kafka/Redpanda, Helm, Docker.

How We Take Care of You

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

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace committed to hiring a diverse workforce.