From the listing
About the role
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.
The market data team is responsible for improving the overall architecture of Alpaca connected to data products such as stocks, options, crypto, and foreign exchange markets. The team is tasked with planning, ideating, experimenting, and putting into production new services and libraries that overcome technical challenges as we scale rapidly.
We are looking for senior or staff engineers who are keen on providing quality solutions, have great fundamentals, have proven experience building and architecting at scale, and are not afraid of challenging conventions.
What you'll do
- 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
- Participate in on-call rotation to assist with timely engineering projects
What they're looking for
- At least 4 years of experience working on systems at scale
- Experience with compiled imperative languages (e.g. Go, C, C++, Rust)
- SQL or relational database skills
- Familiarity with TCP/IP and UDP networking
- Proficient with Linux/BSD and shell scripting
- Proven track record of architecting and leading medium-scale projects involving multiple teams
- Experience with Kubernetes or other workload orchestration systems
- Experience with major cloud platforms (GCP preferred)
- A passion for financial markets
Nice to have
- Experience with Market Data
- Knowledge of microservice architectures
- Knowledge of clean code principles
- DevOps mindset
- Cloud Networking experience (BGP, VPC peering)
- Experience in building low-latency applications
- Experience with distributed key-value stores
- Experience with CI/CD
- Knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies
- Experience with observability, tracing, and continuous profiling
- Experience with capacity planning and benchmarking
From the company page
Alpaca benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Our teams are not just global, we’re also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica).”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Alpaca
I like their clear views on the value of remote work, check out this quote from their careers page:
> "Our teams are not just global, we're also 100% remote and have team members in almost every time zone and continent (except Antarctica). By joining Alpaca you'll be part of a multicultural, international organization."
I also like that their Glassdoor scores are going up (now 3.7/5), and they have some solid testimonials. I'm a LITTLE wary of this statement that gives me a bit of a "hustle culture" vibe:
> "We're keen on that last 10% of effort and believe that the details do matter. If this sounds like you, then you're in the right place."