Senior Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Senior Software Engineer, Risk and Margin

Alpaca is a US-headquartered self-clearing broker-dealer and brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24 / 5 trading, and more. Our recent Series C funding round brought our total investment to over $170 million, fueling our ambitious vision.

Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totaling over 6 million brokerage accounts.

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.

Alpaca is proudly backed by top-tier global investors, including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Unbound, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Elefund, and Y Combinator.

We're a dynamic team of 230+ 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! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core valuesStay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountableand are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply.

Your Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer to join our Core Trading Team. This team is responsible for designing and maintaining the critical infrastructure that powers our trading systems from order routing and execution engines to market connectivity and real-time risk controls. You will work closely with traders, quants, and other engineers to deliver high-performance, reliable, and scalable trading platforms.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in high-stakes, low-latency environments, has strong systems-level engineering experience, and enjoys tackling performance bottlenecks and large-scale distributed systems problems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-performance trading infrastructure, including order management systems, execution gateways, and market data distribution.
• Optimize low-latency systems for throughput, determinism, and fault tolerance.
• Integrate with global exchanges, brokers, and ECNs, ensuring robust FIX / FAST / OUCH / ITCH connectivity.
• Build real-time risk checks and margin controls aligned with compliance requirements.
• Develop and maintain core libraries, APIs, and frameworks used across trading desks.
• Collaborate with quants and traders to prototype and productionize new strategies.
• Monitor, debug, and optimize production systems to ensure high availability and rapid recovery.
• Mentor junior engineers and set engineering standards for code quality, testing, and deployment.

Qualifications

Preferred Skills

How We Take Care of You

Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce.