From the listing
About the role
Alpaca is seeking a Staff Full Stack Engineer to lead the technical direction of the team building the Trading API product. This team serves developers, traders, and institutions, owning the end-to-end customer experience including platform access, account security, and trading applications.
The role involves working across the stack on identity systems, account models, and integrations for partner apps and AI agents. You will be the senior technical anchor, partnering with Product and Design to build high-trust systems where security and real-time data accuracy are critical.
You will lead through architecture, code, and mentorship rather than direct people management. As a principal contributor, you will drive the technical roadmap and work closely with trading, risk, and platform teams.
What you'll do
- Own the architecture and technical roadmap for identity, authentication, and authorization systems.
- Design access models for complex account structures, ensuring permissions are explicit and enforced.
- Lead technical delivery of next-generation applications including real-time market data and order entry.
- Drive the migration from legacy monolith endpoints to a dedicated application backend with clear API contracts.
- Set the security bar for customer-facing systems, including MFA, passkeys, and OAuth flows.
- Establish standards for safe delivery, including feature flags, staged rollouts, and production observability.
- Partner with Product, Design, Compliance, and Security to define behaviors and integration boundaries.
- Lead design reviews and mentor senior and mid-level engineers.
- Act as a technical point of escalation for production issues and drive incident prevention.
What they're looking for
- 8+ years of software engineering experience across backend services and customer-facing applications.
- Proven ownership of production systems where defects could cause financial loss or security breaches.
- Deep experience with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, MFA, and permission models.
- Strong backend expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java/Kotlin/C#/Rust with a willingness to use Go.
- Strong frontend experience with TypeScript and React for complex, state-heavy applications.
- Solid knowledge of PostgreSQL, REST, gRPC, and service-oriented systems on Kubernetes.
- Demonstrated care for threat modeling, testing strategy, and edge-case analysis.
- Experience with technical leadership and mentorship across teams.
Nice to have
- Experience building trading, brokerage, or other financial applications.
- Experience with identity platforms like Amazon Cognito, Keycloak, or Auth0.
- Knowledge of API platforms, developer dashboards, and rate limiting.
- Experience with agentic AI integrations such as MCP servers.
- Familiarity with FIX or institutional trading workflows.
- Experience leading migrations off legacy monoliths in production-critical environments.
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."